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Automation is increasingly seen by the mining industry as a lever to reduce costs and improve safety. The deployment and integration of technology in mining is today usually done by adopting bespoke solutions where opportunities are identified. There is limited attention given to the broader needs that might be relevant in a complete mine-wide automation solution. The missing overarching plan for...
Tactile sensing is an important ability for a humanoid robot which interacts in an unstructured environment. Such a system needs to sense and evaluate surface properties of objects that it interacts with. Among those properties, surface texture identification is a compulsory ability for certain kind of robot systems such as service robots, medical robots and exploratory robots. Therefore, the tactile...
Finding a fire fast is crucial in firefighting. For risky situations, it would be idealistic to send a firefighting robot that could quickly and efficiently find the fire and suppress it. This paper introduces an algorithm developed for an intelligent firefighting mobile robot to find a fire efficiently by fusing long wave infrared camera, ultraviolet radiation sensor, and LIDAR. For its validation,...
At the present, tactile sensor technology can be found many applications in many industrial and medical areas, and is still attracting more and more research attention. In this paper, a new tactile sensor, focusing on the characterization of different tissues, is designed. Tissue characterization plays an important role in minimally invasive surgery which lacks the force feedback. Consider a compatible...
Otitis Media with Effusion (OME) is a very common ear disease affecting both children and adults worldwide. Myringotomy and ventilation tube (grommet) insertion on the eardrum is carried out when medication as a treatment for OME fails. In this paper, the current approaches are revisited and the extensive setup and requirements are simplified to a novel “all-in-one” device allowing office-based grommet...
The ionic electromechanically active polymer actuators with ionic liquid electrolytes working in air also respond to ambient relative humidity. The physicochemical parameters, especially viscosity and conductivity, of ionic liquids are strongly dependent on temperature as well as on their water content. By measuring the impedance between the actuator electrodes, the relative humidity value can be...
Range scanning sensors are widely used to achieve perception-related automation functions. This paper presents an evaluation study of two RaDAR and four LiDAR range scanning sensors with the objective of characterizing their capabilities and limitations for surface mining automation applications. A methodology is presented that evaluates sensors by their capability to meet the requirements of candidate...
“Centrifuge-on-a-chip” is a versatile and multifunctional microfluidic chip which can conduct operations of selective trapping, enrichment, labeling and solution exchange. In this work, the mechanism of selective trapping ability was studied by both the experiments and numerical simulation. We proved the existence of shear gradient lift force in the expansion-contraction cavity and derived an explicit...
This paper outlines design and system identification of a micro coaxial helicopter testbed. A commercially available micro coaxial helicopter is modified to include onboard avionics that enable realtime inertial measurements, multi-channel servo control, and bidirectional communication with a basestation computer. Recorded input-output flight data is used to identify the helicopter's attitude dynamics...
The incorporation of intrinsic compliance in robotic actuation systems has attracted the attention during recent years due to the considerable benefits which is not possible to achieve with conventional “stiff” actuation systems. However, despite the numerous compliant robots developed, a systematic method for tuning the passive elasticity of the individual joints is still missing. This tuning is...
This paper proposes a new criterion for redundancy resolution of human arm in reaching tasks. First, an assumption of minimum Total Potential Energy (TPE) principle is proposed to explain how human exploit the kinematic redundancy of their arms to choose the natural arm postures in reaching tasks. This is the basis as well as the physical meaning of the new criterion. The TPE of human arm includes...
This paper introduces a wearable lower-limb assistive device that helps caregivers assisting transfer of an elderly or a physically challenged person between a bed and a wheelchair or between a wheelchair and a toilet. Based on our preliminary survey of the caregivers at a hospital and a nursing home, a wearable assistive device to release caregiver's physical load should have four functions: (a)...
Skill shortage is a realistic social problem that Australia is currently facing, especially in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Various approaches have been proposed to soften this issue. By now the most successful approach is to attract pre-university youth and university freshmen into those fields before they make a decision on future subjects by introducing...
Robots which are supposed to replace a human worker need sophisticated manipulation capabilities. Such capabilities are required for demanding everyday tasks as well as for specialized operations. This includes, e.g., dexterous manipulations in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery.
The mechanical response of pneumatic artificial muscles is analyzed assuming the inextensibility of the sheathing braids and taking into account the stress field inside the rubber bladder, which is regarded as a Mooney-Rivlin hyperelastic material. The end effects are simulated by heuristically profiling the meridian section. After estimating the constitutive parameters by traction tests on rubber...
This work details the design, simulation, and experimental testing of a mechanically actuated smart hospital bed for the prevention of pressure ulcers in hospital patients. The smart hospital bed, or Smartbed, is designed to improve the “turning” process currently performed by health care workers, ensuring that patients are turned consistently and decreasing the labor requirement for caregivers. The...
There are many difficulties to overcome for the application of the vision system in the actual industry. The advantages of the proposed vision control algorithms are to make the robot move actively in the uncertain circumstance, even if the relative position between camera and robot, and the focal length and orientation of cameras are unknown. The reason is that the vision system model used for this...
Methods for dynamic calibrations of Industrial Robots (IR) are increasing their importance in many applications because of high performances attained by model-based control strategies. Most of known state-of-the-art methods aim at modeling robots along the complete workspace, often affecting the identified parameters with loss of physical meaning (e.g. negative inertia values) and requiring a wide...
Recently, there has been significant interest in conducting polymer actuators including their applications in micro devices and micro manipulation. A feedback control system is usually used to enhance the positioning ability of these actuators in order to widen their application areas. To this end, a feedback sensor is employed to acquire the position feedback information for implementing the control...
A wearable robot is the robotic system capable of augmenting or amplifying the wearer's muscle strength. To imitate human arms, the recognition of muscle stiffness and the reflection of the motion are very important. In this paper, the upper limb of the wearer is bandaged with the pneumatic muscle stiffness sensor (MSS), and the wearer's intention is estimated by recognizing the movement of the muscle...
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