According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

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Guidance And Control Of Ocean Vehicles

A surgical tool having an elongated shaft having a proximal end and distal end. A surgical end effector is located about the distal end. The surgical end effector has a plurality of effector mechanisms comprising a plurality of degree of freedoms. An effector body is located at the proximal end. The effector body includes a plurality of motor interfaces for driving the plurality of effector mechanisms. A transmission is coupled to the effector body

Surgical Instrument with Shiftable Transmission

The recent advances in state estimation, perception, and navigation algorithms have significantly contributed to the ubiquitous use of quadrotors for inspection, mapping, and aerial imaging. To further increase the versatility of quadrotors, recent works investigated the use of an adaptive morphology, which consists of modifying the shape of the vehicle during flight to suit a specific task or environment. However, these works either increase the complexity of the platform or decrease its controllability. In this letter, we propose a novel, simpler, yet effective morphing design for quadrotors consisting of a frame with four independently rotating arms that fold around the main frame. To guarantee stable flight at all times, we exploit an optimal control strategy that adapts on the fly to the drone morphology. We demonstrate the versatility of the proposed adaptive morphology in different tasks, such as negotiation of narrow gaps, close inspection of vertical surfaces, and object grasping and transportation. The experiments are performed on an actual, fully autonomous quadrotor relying solely on onboard visual-inertial sensors and compute. No external motion tracking systems and computers are used. This is the first work showing stable flight without requiring any symmetry of the morphology.

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The Foldable Drone: A Morphing Quadrotor That Can Squeeze and Fly

Underwater robot designs inspired by the behavior, physiology, and anatomy of fishes can provide enhanced maneuverability, stealth, and energy efficiency. Over the last two decades, robotics researchers have developed and reported a large variety of fish-inspired robot designs. The purpose of this review is to report different types of fish-inspired robot designs based upon their intended locomotion patterns. We present a detailed comparison of various design features like sensing, actuation, autonomy, waterproofing, and morphological structure of fish-inspired robots reported in the past decade. We believe that by studying the existing robots, future designers will be able to create new designs by adopting features from the successful robots. The review also summarizes the open research issues that need to be taken up for the further advancement of the field and also for the deployment of fish-inspired robots in practice.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3190/11/3/031001/pdf

Fish-inspired robots: design, sensing, actuation, and autonomy--a review of research.

The current trends in the robotics field have led to the development of large-scale multiple robot systems, and they are deployed for complex missions. The robots in the system can communicate and interact with each other for resource sharing and task processing. Many of such systems fail despite the availability of necessary resources. The major reason for this is their poor coordination mechanism. Task planning, which involves task decomposition and task allocation, is paramount in the design of coordination and cooperation strategies of multiple robot systems. Task allocation mechanism allocates the task in a mission to the robots by maximizing the overall expected performance, and thereby reducing the total allocation cost for the team. In this paper, we formulate a heuristic search-based task allocation algorithm for the task processing in heterogeneous multiple robot system, by maximizing the efficiency in terms of both communication and processing cost. We assume a set of decomposed tasks of a mission, which needs to be allocated to the robots. The near-optimal allocation schemes are found using the proposed peer structure algorithm for the given problem, where the number of the tasks is more than the robots present in the system. The cost function is the summation of static overhead cost of robots, assignment cost, and the communication cost between the dependent tasks, if they are assigned to different robots. Experiments are performed to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm by comparing it with the existing methods in terms of computational time and quality of solution. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs the best under different problem scales. This proves that the algorithm can be scaled for larger system and it can work for dynamic multiple robot system.

An algorithm for cooperative task allocation in scalable, constrained multiple robot systems

This paper discusses a real-time obstacle avoidance algorithm and its implementation for an underactuated flat-fish type autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) in 3D space. The algorithm has been developed using multi-point potential field (MPPF) method and its real-time testing is carried out using hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulations. In MPPF method, a region of predefined radius on a hemisphere in the positive x-axis around the bow of an AUV is discretized into equiangular points with centre as the current position. By determining the point at which the minimum total potential exists, the vehicle can be moved towards that point. Here the analytical gradient of the total potential function is not calculated as it is not essentially required for moving the vehicle to the next position. The MPPF method is interfaced with dynamic model of an underactuated flat-fish type AUV and it is tested and verified using HIL simulation tool. The details of the dynamics of AUV, MPPF method and its implementation, development of HIL test bench and the simulation results are presented in this paper. The results show that the proposed MPPF method is very effective for obstacle avoidance in 3D space and can be used in the real-time control of the AUV.

Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for an Underactuated Flat-Fish Type Autonomous Underwater Vehicle in 3d Space

Design and analysis of a hybrid electric powertrain for military tracked vehicles

Tele-operated robotic surgery is becoming popular and there is a need for design of better robotic arms for increased dexterity and user convenience. In the master-slave configuration of surgical robots, master manipulator plays an important role in ensuring user comfort and dexterity. The design and analysis of a master arm with 6 DOF with a wrist decoupled configuration is presented here. Primary focus of the design is to reduce the number of balancing masses required. By strategically positioning the joint axes, the balancing requirement for some of the axes has been eliminated. Also, through proper design modifications, remote placement of balancing masses has been achieved which reduces the net inertia of the system. Static balancing of the arm is analysed and an optimal design to achieve the balancing is presented. The residual imbalance is corrected through inertia compensation using feed forward control. The design details of the arm, its kinematic analysis, and balancing are presented in this paper.

Static balancing and inertia compensation of a master manipulator for tele-operated surgical robot application

Design of controllers for underwater vehicles is challenging due to their nonlinear dynamics, time-varying model parameters, and environmental disturbances, which are difficult to measure or estimate. Conventional linear controllers sometimes fail to handle these issues effectively and hence it is necessary to design special controllers that are robust under such circumstances. Variable buoyancy (VB) engines are used in many underwater vehicles and standalone buoyancy modules are being developed for multiple underwater applications. Design and analysis of a hybrid depth controller for a single degree of freedom, standalone VB module, vBuoy, is presented in this paper. The design and mathematical model of the vBuoy is presented along with its open-loop performance analysis. A hybrid controller, which captures the best characteristics of a proportional–integral–derivative controller, a linear quadratic regulator, and a sliding mode controller, is designed for the depth control of the module. Based on the desired transient and steady-state behavior of the system, a supervisory controller is used to switch between the conventional controllers. The comparison of simulation results between the proposed hybrid controller and the conventional controllers shows a significant improvement in the closed-loop performance. The performance is evaluated using the parameters such as rise time, percentage overshoot, settling time, and root mean square error. The same has been implemented in an experimental vBuoy prototype to verify the performance of the hybrid controller and also to validate the robustness of the controller. Based on the simulation and experimental results, it was observed that the hybrid controller improves the trajectory tracking performance by 28%–33%.

Asokan Thondiyath

Papers

An algorithm for cooperative task allocation in scalable, constrained multiple robot systems

Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for an Underactuated Flat-Fish Type Autonomous Underwater Vehicle in 3d Space

Design and analysis of a hybrid electric powertrain for military tracked vehicles

Static balancing and inertia compensation of a master manipulator for tele-operated surgical robot application

Theoretical and Experimental Investigations on the Design of a Hybrid Depth Controller for a Standalone Variable Buoyancy System— vBuoy