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Co-robots that can effectively move with and operate alongside humans in a variety of conditions could revolutionize the utility of robots for a wide range of applications. Unfortunately, most current robotic systems have difficulty operating in human environments that people easily traverse, much less interact with people. Wheeled robots have difficulty climbing stairs or going over rough terrain...
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...
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...
In this paper, an application of an embedded system running on the Android operating system to a behavioral control system of mobile robot is presented. In the behavioral control system, the behaviors concerning collision-free and goal-oriented movement are functionally classified into two distinct modules and smoothly cooperated based on a fuzzy logic system. The application is successfully tested...
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...
An intelligent system named Laboratory Mobile Robot Transportation System (LMRTS) has been developed for the mobile robotic transportation in laboratory automation. In this paper, a new approach is presented to predict and manage the on-board battery voltages of the mobile robots for optimizing the LMRTS system. The LMRTS can select and optimize the best mobile robotic candidate for a transportation...
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...
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...
A nature snake changes its gaits in different environment, so it is important for a snake-like robot to have more available gaits for a higher adaptability. In this paper, a novel snake-like robot is proposed to verify the motion fusion of rectilinear gait and serpentine gait. At first, the two gaits ant their fusions are analyzed and modeled. Then, the robot mechanism is designed to realize these...
This paper considers Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) in the context of snake robot locomotion. NMPC is an optimal control technique that offers the ability of handling constraints although requiring relatively significant computational resources. In detail, we show how NMPC can be applied to achieve straight line path following control of snake robots. The paper presents simulation results...
This paper presents a novel method based on the velocity disturbance to control the locomotion of a snake-like robot. The inputs are joint torques which are derived from the dynamics equations. The traditional dynamics equations of a snake-like robot are complex, so a simplified dynamics equations are firstly derived based on the differential geometry theory. Then the velocity disturbance is introduced...
This paper presents a novel multi-sensor-based robot localization framework inspired by human coarse-to-fine recognition mechanism to realize fast and robust localization in the process of robot navigation. This localization framework consists of two parts: coarse place recognition and accurate location estimation. The coarse place recognition is realized using an onboard camera, whereas an image...
Detecting and tracking humans are key problems for human-robot interaction. In this paper we present an algorithm for mobile robots to detect and track people reliably, even when humans go through different illumination conditions, often change in a wide variety of poses, and are frequently occluded. We have improved the performance of face and upper body detection to quickly find people in each frame...
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...
In this paper, we propose a path-planning algorithm for mobile robots having sensors with a limited field of view. The proposed method predicts the observable region in the planning phase and minimizes incursions into unobservable regions. The path-planning process of the proposed method not only involves the actions required for reaching a destination but also the actions required for obtaining information...
Considering stability problems of the current corridor recognition algorithm based on laser scanner, this paper proposes a method for mobile robot fast laser-based corridor recognition. Firstly, Median filter is used to deal with the laser scan to reduce the noise. Then, it employs segmentation method to cluster the data to remove some isolated points. After that, it is feasible to calculate the direction...
The localization is an important task for intelligent mobile robot systems and the robot cooperation may bring benefits for the task in a multi-robot team. A localization method for leader-follower formations is proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, the leader robot adopts an Extended Kalman filter to fuses data from multiple sensors. Kinect with depth camera is a rich source of information...
This paper describes about experimental verifications on the cricket's response against frequent interactions and how it changes in time development. In order to investigate behavior modification, we took the approach to utilize automated interaction systems with a robotic agent and observe the reactions of the male cricket. The robotic agent robes cricket's pheromone and is controlled by designing...
In this paper we investigate the action selection problem for multiple mobile robots active and cooperative global localization in large environments. Firstly, an off-line localizability estimation approach using known probabilistic grid map (PGM) is briefly proposed and a localizability matrix is presented to describe properties of expected localization probability distribution (LPD). Based on the...
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