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This paper shows a study on two chambers soft actuator development and its application to an artificial soft actuator fin. Simulations of two chambers actuator are conducted using finite element method software and the bending angles produced are computed. Eleven designs are proposed and compared which differ in separating wall thickness, actuator thickness, fiber location, fiber materials, and rubber...
Search and rescue robots are being used more frequently to access hazardous environments to assess situations and locate survivors. There are a wide range of existing mobile platforms for various situations and environments, but these robots are typically bulky, heavy or expensive, limiting their widespread and practical use in case of disaster mitigation. Also, like most robots, locomotive robots...
For robot applications in unknown or hazardous environments, such as search and rescue, it is difficult and stressful for human beings to merely simply teleoperate a mobile robot without assistance. Consequently, much research work focuses on the means to facilitate an efficient shared autonomy between human and robot in the field of robotics. In our previous work, a novel shared autonomy system has...
Search and rescue field missions, especially in environments which are dangerous for humans, increasingly requires the usage of robust and flexible robots. We describe the development of the modular reconfigurable robot KAIRO 3 focusing on applications in search and rescue, inspection and maintenance. After a short retrospect of previous generations of modular robots, the latest design of KAIRO 3...
This paper presents a cooperative, dynamic and complete information game scheme for socially multi-robot tracking. The concept of ‘variable order’ is introduced to specify the order of trackers' movement. A free competition model for multi-robot system is proposed to compute member robot's trajectory. A set of cost function are derived to evaluate the performance of tracking strategies optimally....
The ability to navigate in complex environments is crucial for both animals and mobile robots. Most mobile robots adopt dead reckoning for navigation because of its high efficiency and low cost. In order to use this navigation mechanism, both distance information and directional information must be available. In this research, a real-time three-channel camera-based polarization navigation sensor is...
This paper presents a method for 3-D based obstacle detection on autonomous vehicles navigating in vegetated environments. At its core three different methods processing the surrounding occupancy, taken at separate stages and volumetric resolutions, are combined to a reliable and broad solution. Geometric relationships are evaluated at a coarse, yet robust, volumetric representation to form an initial...
An intuitive control console for a minimally invasive surgical robotic system has been developed. The system has five degrees of freedom (DOF), which are configured to imitate the traditional laparoscopic forceps both in appearance and function, providing the surgeons with a familiar feel and reducing the training time for the new surgeons. A prototype of the control console was built and tested for...
This paper presents RIVERWATCH, an autonomous surface-aerial marsupial robotic team for riverine environmental monitoring. The robotic system is composed of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) piggybacking a multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. The ASV provides the team with longrange transportation in all-weather conditions, whereas the UAV assures...
With the rapid development of computer vision, the Internet and robot technology, it's potential to develop a telepresence robot for providing service for people who need a real avatar. We present a real-time vision-based telepresence robot hand control system, including the hand detection, hand tracking, hand recognition, 3D hand position and hand control modules. From our experiments, the composition...
This paper presents the development and implementation of Robee, a novel social behavior controller for robots with a focus on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies. Using the homeostatic drive theory, Robee selects the behaviors in order to maintain the needs, mainly psychological and social, within an acceptable range. We propose a hybrid concept for the decision making process, which combines the...
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...
Obstacle avoidance is a key problem required in the mobile robot navigation technology. In this paper, we build up a 3D environment in an intelligent surveillance robot through registration of point clouds and present a method to deal with the obstacle avoidance problem. Firstly, the framework of the intelligent robot is given. Then we register the point clouds from an RGB-D Kinect by applying an...
Navigation is one of the key issues of biped robot, especially in complicated and uncertain human-living environment. There have been challenges for ensuring the stability, efficiency and security of the biped navigation system. In this paper, a framework utilizing sampling-based footstep planner is proposed for the simulation of the biped navigation. Sensor fusion method is adopted to process and...
In this paper, a simple and robust method to recover ego-motion from a RGB-D camera is proposed. For our algorithm, no assumptions about the moving object or dynamic scenes are needed. Using the optical flow fields computed from the image sequence and depth information obtained from the RGB-D camera we estimate the ego-motion parameters. Our experiments have shown that using the intensity image and...
Series elastic actuation (SEA) has been widely used for output force/torque regulation, however, the nonlinearity introduced by its torsion spring hysteresis will greatly affect the quality of feedback control. Thus an experimental procedure is conducted for the modeling and identification of spring hysteresis effect, based on which a compensated control scheme is given. Experiment results show that...
A robot accepted by animals as conspecific is a very powerful tool in behavioral biology, particularly in studies of gregarious animals. In this paper we present the first results of acceptance of a robotic fish designed for experiments on collective animal behavior. The robot consists of two modules: a fish lure fixed on a magnetic base and a miniature mobile robot guiding the lure from below the...
We present the design and implementation of a multi-input and multi-controller system architecture for mobile robots. The proposed system architecture is divided into interchangeable modular subsystems with common interfaces. The paper details the development of a prototype to test the proposed architecture and the implementation of the architecture with the Robot Operating System. Results from indoor...
The rescue robot becomes necessary for searching the survivors in the disaster area. Autonomous rescue robot is developed to increase the searching efficiency while the rescue robot's Tele-Operation is limited. The victim detecting system normally spots the victim with heat sensors. Thermophile array sensor is generally employed to read temperature in the fan-shape fashion. The statically equipped...
In this paper, we propose a novel pictograph detection scheme by removing miss matching points. In our previous work, we developed a robot navigation which uses only one CCD camera equipped on the robot and estimates localize self-position by pictographs on a general environment. However, our system sometimes misjudges feature points on the background as feature points on pictographs. Threfore, our...
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