Open PRAIRIE: Open Public Research Access Institutional Repository and Information Exchange
Abstract
Robotics research has been broadly expanding into various fields during the past decades. It is widely spread and best known for solving many technical necessities in different fields. With the rise of the industrial revolution, it upgraded many factories to use industrial robots to prevent the human operator from dangerous and hazardous tasks. The rapid development of application fields and their complexity have inspired researchers in the robotics community to find innovative solutions to meet the new desired requirements of the field. Currently, the creation of new needs outside the traditional industrial robots are demanding robots to attend to the new market and to assist humans in meeting their daily social needs (i.e., agriculture, construction, cleaning.). The future integration of robots into other types of production processes, added new requirements that require more safety, flexibility, and intelligence in robots. Areas of robotics has evolved into various fields. This dissertation addresses robotics research in four different areas: rehabilitation robots, biologically inspired robots, optimization techniques, and neural network implementation. Although these four areas may seem different from each other, they share some research topics and applications
