Planning algorithms are impacting technical disciplines and industries around the world, including robotics, computer-aided design, manufacturing, computer graphics, aerospace applications, drug design, and protein folding. This coherent and comprehensive book unifies material from several sources, including robotics, control theory, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. The treatment is centered on robot motion planning but integrates material on planning in discrete spaces. A major part of the book is devoted to planning under uncertainty, including decision theory, Markov decision processes, and information spaces, which are the “configuration spaces” of all sensor-based planning problems. The last part of the book delves into planning under differential constraints that arise when automating the motions of virtually any mechanical system. Developed from courses taught by the author, the book is intended for students, engineers, and researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence, and control theory as well as computer graphics, algorithms, and computational biology.

Planning Algorithms: Introductory Material

http://ee.sharif.edu/~miap/Files/A%20Survey%20of%20Medical%20Image%20Registration.pdf

A survey of medical image registration.

A survey of models, analysis tools and compensation methods for the control of machines with friction

Skin plays an important role in mediating our interactions with the world. Recreating the properties of skin using electronic devices could have profound implications for prosthetics and medicine. The pursuit of artificial skin has inspired innovations in materials to imitate skin's unique characteristics, including mechanical durability and stretchability, biodegradability, and the ability to measure a diversity of complex sensations over large areas. New materials and fabrication strategies are being developed to make mechanically compliant and multifunctional skin-like electronics, and improve brain/machine interfaces that enable transmission of the skin's signals into the body. This Review will cover materials and devices designed for mimicking the skin's ability to sense and generate biomimetic signals.

Pursuing prosthetic electronic skin.

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has recently received considerable attention in the academic community, in labs, in technology companies, and through the media. Because of this attention, it is desirable to present a survey of HRI to serve as a tutorial to people outside the field and to promote discussion of a unified vision of HRI within the field. The goal of this review is to present a unified treatment of HRI-related problems, to identify key themes, and discuss challenge problems that are likely to shape the field in the near future. Although the review follows a survey structure, the goal of presenting a coherent "story" of HRI means that there are necessarily some well-written, intriguing, and influential papers that are not referenced. Instead of trying to survey every paper, we describe the HRI story from multiple perspectives with an eye toward identifying themes that cross applications. The survey attempts to include papers that represent a fair cross section of the universities, government efforts, industry labs, and countries that contribute to HRI, and a cross section of the disciplines that contribute to the field, such as human, factors, robotics, cognitive psychology, and design.

/pdf/human-robot-interaction-a-survey-4q8yi606a9.pdf

Human-Robot Interaction: A Survey

An intelligent assist method and apparatus are disclosed. The intelligent assist method includes imparting a manual force to a suspended object, determining an angle at which the suspended object is manually forced, generating motorized power to move the object in accordance with the angle at which the suspended object is forced, and inputting a signal to continue the motorized power and enable the object to continue moving on accordance with the angle at which the suspended object is manually forced.

Methods and apparatus for manipulation of heavy payloads with intelligent assist devices

Previously, force-assembly has been defined as an assembly process for which a single admittance control law (i.e., a single nominal velocity in conjunction with a single mapping of forces to motions) can guarantee the proper assembly of a given pair of mating parts. As a testbed application of force-assembly, the insertion of a workpiece into a fixture consisting of multiple rigid fixture elements (fixels) is addressed. Previous work in this area has shown that, when workpiece/fixture contact is frictionless and positional error is infinitesimal, there always exists an admittance control law that will ensure the proper insertion of a workpiece into a deterministic fixture. When workpiece/fixture contact is frictionless, the workpiece/fixture contact force contains the relative positional information required to identify error-reducing motions. Friction between the workpiece and fixture, however, provides a disturbance to the geometrical information contained in the contact force. This paper addresses: 1) the identification of the conditions that must be satisfied for force-assembly with friction, and 2) the formulation and results of an optimization of the admittance control law to obtain the maximum value of friction that will satisfy the force-assembly conditions for a given workpiece/fixture combination. Results indicate that force-assembly fails when the contact forces are no longer characteristic. Forces are characteristic if the possible contact forces that may occur for one type of misalignment are unique to that type of misalignment. >

Force-assembly with friction

It is shown that incomplete pose information collected in accordance with a special data-collection scheme can be successfully used in identifying all the independent kinematic parameters of a robot. A radial-distance transducer, called the telescopic ball-bar system, is used to measure simply the distance of the robot endpoint from a fixed point in the workspace. Special fixtures are mounted on the robot endpoint and on the robot table in order to indirectly access the complete pose information of the robot. All the independent parameters of a six-degree-of-freedom robot have been identified. The procedure provides an easy and economic way of calibrating a robot. >

/pdf/complete-parameter-identification-of-a-robot-from-partial-15kcd77575.pdf

Complete parameter identification of a robot from partial pose information

We describe a variable friction haptic display on a large area of glass, and characterize its performance. The Large Area Tactile Pattern Display (LATPaD) uses modulation of surface friction created by ultrasonic vibration, as in previous smaller devices [8]. Unlike those, the LATPaD does not operate in the lowest resonant mode. As a consequence, the vibration amplitude varies across the surface of the LATPaD (being zero at nodal lines) and therefore the friction reduction effect varies spatially. In practice, the variation in friction reduction is less than might be expected, due to the finite extent of the finger pad. We measure friction over the surface for several mode shapes.

/pdf/friction-measurements-on-a-large-area-tpad-2n277uboi3.pdf

Friction measurements on a Large Area TPaD

The design, control and performance of the Cobotic Hand Controller, a novel, six-degree-of-freedom, admittance controlled haptic display is examined. A highly geared admittance architecture is often used to render high impedances with reasonable sized actuators for a haptic display. The Cobotic Hand Controller is an extremely faithful realization of an admittance display, since it is capable of obtaining an infinite gear ratio and can render infinite impedances (up to its own structural stiffness). The incorporation of continuously variable transmissions utilizing hardened steel elements in dry-friction rolling contact provide the Cobotic Hand Controller with high bandwidth, low power requirements, and an extremely wide stable dynamic range. Here, an admittance based control algorithm for powered cobots, a novel solution to the actuation redundancy of this device, and a heuristic to avoid slip in the transmissions are described. The performance of the Cobotic Hand Controller is measured in terms of dynamic range.

Michael A. Peshkin

Papers

Methods and apparatus for manipulation of heavy payloads with intelligent assist devices

Force-assembly with friction

Complete parameter identification of a robot from partial pose information

Friction measurements on a Large Area TPaD

The Cobotic Hand Controller: Design, Control and Performance of a Novel Haptic Display