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The article introduces an actinomorphic soft robot that possesses a flattened body with a number of arms radially symmetric distributing and extending from robot central disc. Hence, mimicking radially symmetric musculature animals like starfish. The robot arm system, consisted of arm and smart material alloy (SMA) springs is the support structure as well as the robot propulsion device. A novel approach...
Several passive joints are usually needed in surgical robots to decrease the difficulty in doctors' operating, which can be manually rotated without motor pushing. When stopped at a specified position, passive joints should be locked until operation ends, and keep bearing torques. This paper is aimed to design a locking method used in minimally invasive surgical robot. Firstly choose the locking type...
In this paper, the design of a 8 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) force reflection master manipulator for applications in minimally invasive surgery is presented. The manipulator includes three parts: arm mechanism, wrist mechanism and clamping mechanism. Arm mechanism is capable of position and force reflection in three translational motion. The wrist mechanism has a redundant DOF and can provide 3 DOF orientation...
In this paper, we report on our efforts to transport a large object by small mobile robots in a home or office environment. Given such an environment, robots must be compact. We improved the transport capacity of small mobile robots using a handcart. However, there were two problems faced: the risk of a slip and fall under the influence of the reaction force when the robot handles the object, and...
Ensuring the motion stability and improving the mobility are crucial for wheeled ground vehicles (WGVs) to complete their missions, e.g., outdoor inspections and explorations. However, wheel slip may deteriorate the mobility performance and safety, particularly on unknown low-adhesive ground. In this research, a novel methodology to detect the adhesion stability using a force transmitting factor is...
To provide robots for a wide range of users, there needs to be an easy and intuitive way to program them. This issue is addressed by the robot programming by demonstration paradigm, where the user demonstrates the task to the robot. While there exist a lot approaches that use multiple demonstrations for the learning procedure, single-shot robot programming by demonstration is still a niche. Also,...
In this paper, a flexible in-vessel inspection robot for inspecting the first wall inside the vacuum vessel of Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) is modeled using the absolute nodal coordinate formulation. The robot is a macro-micro robot including three curved telescopic booms. When the curved telescopic booms are extracted and retracted during the operation process, its overall...
This research describes the construction of a mechanical cervical traction therapy simulation using a physics software engine. The model consisted of an anatomically correct human skeleton and two types of mechanical traction devices, each representing a unique traction position. While most of the movement in the skeleton simulation model was represented by simple hinges and ball-socket joints, the...
In this work, a new system is presented to measure load and motion in six degrees of freedom synchronously to assess amputee gait in real time. The device is integrated in the shank of lower limb prostheses to measure the gait parameters based on a combination of AHRS (Attitude Heading Reference System) and a strain gauge pylon. This novel mobile and autonomous system enables new possibilities of...
The research work aims at developing a real time non-invasive metabolism and blood circulation surveillance system for monitoring human's health condition by sensing the various bio-signals on human body. Our goal is to use the developed system to study the functions and characters of organs and tissues that highly relate with the metabolism and blood circulation system, also it is expected to help...
Herein, we propose a motion-control algorithm for a vehicle with a large sideslip angle. The proposed algorithm is designed on the basis of the planar motion of the vehicle using a four-wheel vehicle model. The proposed algorithm controls the vehicle velocity, sideslip angle of the vehicle, and yaw rate of the vehicle using the driving forces of the four-wheels and steer angle of the front wheels...
In this paper, the design of a new compliant two-axis PZT actuated gripper is proposed based on flexure mechanisms. Its uniqueness is that both of the two gripper jaws can achieve two degree-of-freedom (DOF) movement. A lever structure is designed to meet the requirement of larger displacement due to the stroke limitation of the actuator. The gripper parameters are optimized by using genetic algorithm...
The goal in minimally-invasive surgery like NOTES (natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery), or single-port surgery, through one artificial incision, is to reduce the operative and post-operative stresses for the patients. Today's challenges for physicians during procedures are the missing mobility of the used flexible instruments inside the human body. Primarily the missing ability to manipulate...
Designing a robotic system for surgical procedures is always challenging. Reliability, integration in the operating room and intuitive use even in stressful situations are some major requirements. Our project aims at the improvement of two widespread interventions in minimally invasive surgery (MIS): the endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) and the laparoscopic sigmoid resection (LSR). We develop...
To access loose sandy terrains, lugs (i.e., grousers) are attached on the surface of wheels/tracks to enhance the traveling performance of mobile robots. To clearly understand lug-soil interaction mechanism, an empirical model of normal force acting on lug during horizontal shearing motion has been established in our previous research. Moreover, it has been found that before this model can be extended...
For an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) system, it is difficult to obtain a precise system model. This is mainly because the USV system is, 1) of extensively complicated and thus presents huge nonlinearities, and 2) easily to be influenced by extensive hydrodynamics. In this paper, our main motivation is to construct a quasi-Linear Parameter Varying (qLPV) dynamical model for a water-jet propulsion...
To improve the mobility of wheeled robots on loose sandy terrain, lugs (i.e., grousers) are attached to the surface of each wheel. Unlike existing studies that focus on the effects of lug shape (e.g. height and width) on lug-soil interaction forces, this study involved experimental and quantitative analyses to investigate the effects of parameters such as inclination angle, sinkage length, and moving...
Mobile microvortices generated by ferromagnetic nanowires (NW) were previously reported to induce fluidic trapping for micromanipulation that can be precisely focused and translated. Based on the prototype of nickel nanowire (Ni NW) fluidic tweezers (FT), we introduce in this paper a dumbbell (DB)-like magnetic actuator assembled by a Ni NW and two polystyrene (PS) microbeads. Actuated by a weak strength...
The disassembly of end-of-life products has thus far seen minimal industrial application of robotics, aside from manufacturers initiatives to refurbish their own products. Conventional robotics in manufacturing lacks the flexibility to deal with the expected small lot sizes, product deviations and failed operations due to product damage. Disassembly systems not owned by manufacturers need to be readily...
We propose an approach that combines human demonstrated posture-control skill defined by the motion in the lower limb joints with an inverse kinematics solution of an arbitrary hand motion. The posture-control skill for humanoid robot was obtained through the human-in-the-loop teaching approach. The collected data during the teaching phase was used to approximate functional relation between the state...
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