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An in-depth understanding of passive bipedal walking is expected to contribute to the design of energy-efficient bipedal gaits and passivity-mimicking control laws. In this paper we investigate virtual passive bipedal walking in terms of generalized force and kinetic energy, and derive three characteristic equations which describe some essential mechanism of virtual passive bipedal walking and can...
Uneven terrain walking is one of the important premises for biped robots to serve people. However, it is one of the key challenges for biped robots walking on a slope. In this paper, a universal method to generate patterns for biped robot walking on a three-dimensional (3D) slope is proposed. Different from most researches, which only focused on the specific walking directions on a slope as across...
A real submersible flying boat which is both flight-capable and submersible has hardly been reported yet. In this paper, the Flying Fish created by Beihang University will be introduced to verify the feasibility of this kind of novel aircraft. The Flying Fish achieves its ability to transfer between the air and the water by imitating the flying fish and aquatic birds. The morphological characteristics...
This paper proposes a human face tracking system for obtaining elderly people's facial images, which can be used to estimate their individual emotion. Quadrotors are used to overcome occlusion and obtain closer facial images, while Kinect sensors provide human detection and quadrotor navigation. Noise from the measured head position results in vibration of the goal position, and subsequently the quadrotor,...
Fire extinguishment approaches with inert gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen (N2) have several advantages compared with ones with water. On the other hand, they have low extinguishment performance and put lives at risk. To enhance the extinguishment performance and to reduce risk to life, the authors have proposed a robotic fire extinguishment approach and a prototype of an aerial extinguisher...
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play vital role in a number of application domains including search and rescue, traffic monitoring, border control, to name a few. A robust computer vision system for detecting and tracking moving targets is essential to enable UAVs operate autonomously against challenges such as occlusions and abrupt camera motion. This paper presents a robust system that can handle...
With the availability of low-cost micro aerial vehicles (MAVs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) quickly gain popularity and application potential. This requires techniques that can be understood by non-experts and flexibly applied for rapid prototyping. Visual tracking is an essential task with many applications, such as autonomous navigation and scene acquisition. While marker-less methods emerge,...
Rotor flying manipulator (RFM) is a system composed of a rotorcraft and a manipulator. RFM possesses great potential applications and thus has got much concern of the researchers all over the world. However, controller design of the RFM is challenging because of the dynamical coupling between the rotorcraft and the manipulator perplexes the whole system model structure, so the flight performance of...
In recent years, a rehabilitation method in which a quadriplegic person can perform training without a therapist has been proposed, and studies that use functional electrical stimulation (FES) have been promoted. However, FES induces muscle contractions that tend to be stronger than voluntary contractions, and hence increases the muscle load too easily. Accordingly, the resultant excessive contractions...
Dexterous hand and arm function are crucial for execution of activities of daily living (ADLs). However, it remains difficult for patients with neurological deficits, such as stroke, to recover the lost function. In this paper, a versatile haptic interface, omega. 7, has been employed to interact with the patient to perform designed dexterous manipulation tasks. Following the neurocognitive approach,...
Previous studies demonstrated that bimanual coordination can assist to rehabilitation program for patients with hemiplegia by improving their motor functions. Moreover, in addition to the rehabilitation assistance, bimanual coordination can also be used for prosthesis users to improve the usability of prosthesis. Intention detection and motion control algorithms for one hand case have been investigated...
The problem of door opening is very fundamental for mobile manipulators operating in domestic environments. In order to successfully achieve the door opening task with wheeled mobile redundant manipulators, a manipulability improving scheme is proposed and investigated in this paper. The scheme treats the wheelchair and the manipulator as a whole system and can improve the manipulator's manipulability...
Millions of physical disabilities, who have lost a hand or both hands, are in need of prosthetic hands not only for decoration but also for the functions to help them with basic daily activities. Although EMG prosthetic hands are being extensively studied to satisfy this need, most of them are too expensive to be economically available, difficult to operate and maintain by a user him/herself, or over...
Lower extremity exoskeletons are intelligent wearable robots that integrate human intelligence with the strength of humanoid robots. Recently, lower extremity exoskeletons have been developed for rehabilitation and assistance of paralysis patients. This paper presents design of a novel anthropomorphic lower extremity exoskeleton with compatible hip joints and knee joints that help paralysis patients...
With the advantages of small size and low cost RSSI-based ranging and positioning technology is suitable for the large-scale applications or indoor environments. Whereas multipath structure of indoor radio channel caused by complex indoor environment, as well as the far field conditions of antennas are not feasible due to the short propagation distance, have a strong impact on indoor positioning accuracy...
In this paper, we propose a novel localization method for indoor-wheeled robots. The system consists of fusing scene and range data to make more robust the 3D-to-3D egomotion estimation, which is typically done via ICP. To validate our approach and assess its performance, a system comprised of a laser range finder paired with a monocular camera is implemented and several experiments are performed...
Most robot semantic mapping methods only consider the intrinsic properties of landmarks and objects inside a scene, by detecting them with their appearances, and some other methods include extrinsic properties with manually designed object relations. In this work, we use relational operators to capture the extrinsic property values, and adopt conditional random field to integrate intrinsic and extrinsic...
Localisation and mapping are fundamental capabilities for autonomous mobile robots, and there has been a large amount of recent work in these fields. However, much of the work does not consider dynamic environments that include humans and moving objects. Such objects can cause occlusions resulting in a fewer visible landmarks, which can decrease localisation performance. This paper describes a novel...
A means for fast and accurate indoor localization using point-cloud data is presented. A sparse environment model is proposed, comprised of a list of planar patches. It is shown that, with this simplified model, incoming point-cloud data can be associated rapidly with one (or none) of the constituent planes, and the environment model can be fit to the clustered sample points algebraically in a least-squares...
This paper presents a new real-time localization method for indoor service robots based on camera and laser. First of all, it is proved that planar motion of an upward camera in the floor plane can be solved by only two matching points with equal depth. Then, a real-time indoor localization method is proposed accordingly using an upward fisheye camera mounted on the robot and two fixed laser pointers...
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