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

We consider teleoperation in which a slave manipulator, seen in one or more video images, is controlled by moving a master manipulandum. The operator must mentally transform (i.e., rotate, translate, scale, and/or deform) the desired motion of the slave image to determine the required motion at the master. Our goal is to make these mental transformations less taxing in order to decrease operator training time, improve task time/performance, and expand the pool of candidate operators. In this paper, we introduce a framework for describing the transformations required to use a particular teleoperation setup. We analyze in detail the mental transformations required in an interface consisting of one camera and display. We then expand our discussion to setups with multiple cameras/displays and discuss the results from an initial experiment.

/pdf/improving-teleoperation-reducing-mental-rotations-and-3ugxc7kekv.pdf

Improving teleoperation: reducing mental rotations and translations

A simple radial-distance linear transducer (LVDT) that measures the distance from several fixed points in the workspace to the robot's endpoint has been used to infer the kinematic parameters of a robot. The motivation, theory, implementation, and performance of this particularly easy calibration and parameter identification method are discussed. A disagreement in the literature about the type of measuring system (in particular, the dimensionality of the pose measurements) needed to fully identify a robot's kinematic parameters is addressed. >

Identifying robot parameters using partial pose information

A haptic device includes a substrate that is subjected to lateral motion such as lateral oscillation with one or more degrees of freedom together with modulation of a friction reducing oscillation in a manner that can create a shear force on the user's finger or on an object on the device.

Haptic device with controlled traction forces

Several species of animals use whiskers to accurately navigate and explore objects in the absence of vision. We have developed inexpensive arrays of artificial whiskers based on strain-gage and Flex Sensor technologies that can be used either in passive (“dragging”) mode, or in active (“whisking”) mode. In the present work we explore the range of functions that whisker arrays can serve on a rover. We demonstrate that when mounted on a rover, whisker arrays can (1) Detect obstacles and determine obstacle distance (2) Map terrain features (3) Determine ground and surface texture (4) Provide an estimate of rover speed (5) Identify “slip” of the rover wheels, and (6) Perform 3-dimensional extraction of object shape. We discuss the potential use of whisker arrays on planetary rovers and as an investigative tool for exploring the encoding of sensory information in the nervous system of animals.

/pdf/multifunctional-whisker-arrays-for-distance-detection-4wnijdcgy2.pdf

Multifunctional Whisker Arrays for Distance Detection, Terrain Mapping, and Object Feature Extraction

Peshkin and Sanderson (1988) showed that parts can be aligned as they move on a conveyor belt against a passive sequence of fences. In this paper the authors describe the first complete algorithm to design such sequences for a given convex polygonal part. The algorithm is complete in the sense that it is guaranteed to find a design if one exists and to terminate with a negative report otherwise. Based on an exact breadth-first search of the design space, the algorithm is also guaranteed to find the design requiring the fewest fences. The authors describe the algorithm and compare results with those previously reported. The authors conjecture that a fence design exists to orient any convex polygonal part defined by a sequence of rational vertices.

Michael A. Peshkin

Papers

Improving teleoperation: reducing mental rotations and translations

Identifying robot parameters using partial pose information

Haptic device with controlled traction forces

Multifunctional Whisker Arrays for Distance Detection, Terrain Mapping, and Object Feature Extraction

A complete algorithm for designing passive fences to orient parts