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

Studies have shown locomotor adaptation of the ankle to assistive torques, but the ability of the knee to adapt to assistive forces has not yet been explored. Understanding how humans modulate knee joint kinematics during gait could be valuable for designing assistive devices for stroke patients. In this study we examined how healthy subjects adapt to knee flexion torque assistance during gait. We hypothesized that 1) when given assistance subjects would adapt their locomotor patterns to walk with kinematics similar to baseline values and 2) removal of assistance following adaptation would result in substantially reduced knee flexion. Contrary to expectations, data from the five subjects show a weak adaptation and an increase in knee flexion kinematics after forces were removed. These results suggest that neuromuscular control of the knee joint during walking is not strongly modulated by feedforward mechanisms.

/pdf/adaptation-to-knee-flexion-torque-during-gait-2qngsmsa27.pdf

Adaptation to knee flexion torque during gait

The KineAssist is a robotic device that allows the therapist to safely interact with and challenge a patient as they train in whole body dynamic-balance tasks such as sit to stand or gait. The design and development of the KineAssist proceeded rapidly as a startup product of a small company. Here we briefly restate the KineAssist's motivation, design, and use, and then present an initial evaluation of the alpha-prototype's performance on healthy and stroke survivors. The studies showed that sacral marker trajectories were slower but otherwise not significantly changed in amplitude when using the device. The KineAssist therefore yields a safe environment for training functional mobility tasks, and these results identify a promising method of safely challenging patients to exert more effort while maintaining natural kinematic ranges of motion.

/pdf/motility-evaluation-of-a-novel-overground-functional-2ibce6bq88.pdf

Motility Evaluation of a Novel Overground Functional Mobility Tool for Post Stroke Rehabilitation

An apparatus for use in breaking down an animal carcass is described including: an arm; an end effector is mounted to the arm for effecting actions on the carcass; the end effector includes an input device for detecting input forces of a worker; a motive device is associated with the arm for driving the arm in response to the input forces to effectively amplify the input forces of the worker; and wherein the end effector is rotatable in at least one plane with respect to the arm.

An apparatus for use in breaking down an animal carcass

—Cobots are a class of robots that use inﬁnitelyvariable transmissions to develop high ﬁdelity programmableconstraint surfaces. Cobots consume very little electrical powereven when resisting high forces, and their transmissions arehighly power efﬁcient across a broad range of transmissionratios. We have recently introduced the Cobotic Hand Controller,a haptic display that illustrates the high dynamic range andlow power consumption achievable by cobots. In this paperwe present models of the rotational-to-linear rolling contacttransmissions utilized in the Cobotic Hand Controller. We com-pare their efﬁciency to ﬁxed ratio gear-trains. We also comparethe overall power efﬁciency of the cobotic architecture to thepower efﬁciency of a conventional electro-mechanical actuationscheme, for both constant and dynamic power ﬂows. The coboticarchitecture is shown to be more efﬁcient at frequencies andpower levels characteristic of voluntary human motions. I. I NTRODUCTION C OBOTIC devices control the relative velocities of theirlinks by modulating inﬁnitely variable transmissions(IVTs) with small steering actuators [1]. Cobotic IVTs havebeen developed to relate two translational velocities, tworotational velocities, or a rotational velocity to a translationalvelocity, and have been utilized in a variety of haptic

Power Efficiency of the Rotational-to-Linear Infinitely Variable Cobotic Transmission

Rich tactile interaction with control surfaces has been compromised in the transition to touch interfaces This paper discusses new haptic effects that restore physicality to touch interaction by dynamically altering a touchscreen's frictional properties

Michael A. Peshkin

Papers

Adaptation to knee flexion torque during gait

Motility Evaluation of a Novel Overground Functional Mobility Tool for Post Stroke Rehabilitation

An apparatus for use in breaking down an animal carcass

Power Efficiency of the Rotational-to-Linear Infinitely Variable Cobotic Transmission

Restoring physicality to touch interaction with programmable friction