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

The Gestalt theory of perception offered principles by which distributed visual sensations are combined into a structured experience (“Gestalt”). We demonstrate conditions whereby haptic sensations at two fingertips are integrated in the perception of a single object. When virtual bumps were presented simultaneously to the right hand's thumb and index finger during lateral arm movements, participants reported perceiving a single bump. A discrimination task measured the bump's perceived location and perceptual reliability (assessed by differential thresholds) for four finger configurations, which varied in their adherence to the Gestalt principles of proximity (small versus large finger separation) and synchrony (virtual spring to link movements of the two fingers versus no spring). According to models of integration, reliability should increase with the degree to which multi-finger cues integrate into a unified percept. Differential thresholds were smaller in the virtual-spring condition (synchrony) than when fingers were unlinked. Additionally, in the condition with reduced synchrony, greater proximity led to lower differential thresholds. Thus, with greater adherence to Gestalt principles, thresholds approached values predicted for optimal integration. We conclude that the Gestalt principles of synchrony and proximity apply to haptic perception of surface properties and that these principles can interact to promote multi-finger integration.

Multiple Fingers – One Gestalt

The main goal is the identification of all the kinematic parameters of a robot to improve its absolute accuracy. The authors use a simple radial-distance linear transducer which measures the distance from a fixed point in the workspace to the robot's endpoint. These scalar data are accumulated as the robot endpoint is moved within one or more spherical shells centered about the fixed point. Optimal values for all of the independent kinematic parameters of the robot can then be found. The motivation, theory, implementation, and performance of this particularly easy calibration and parameter identification method are discussed. A disagreement in the literature about the class of measurements needed to fully identify a robot's kinematic parameters is addressed. >

Calibration and parameter identification of a 6-DOF robot using a single radial-distance transducer

Erratum: Design of an active one-degree-of-freedom lower-limb exoskeleton with inertia compensation (International Journal of Robotics Research (2010) DOI: 10.1177/0278364910385730)

We invite the reader to think of a passive wrist as a mechanical computer. The wrist computes a particular motion in response to every applied force, and this defines its control law. Suppose that the design of a wrist (the geometric layout of mechanical elements -- springs, hydraulic cylinders, dampers, and so on -- which compose it) is held fixed. We can "program" the wrist by changing the parameters (for example, the spring stiffnesses) of some of these elements. What is the range of control laws such a wrist can execute? The thesis of this paper is that a passive wrist, of fixed design, can be programmed to execute a wide range of useful control laws. We consider in particular wrists whose actuators are unpowered hydraulic cylinders, the ports of which are coupled to one another via variable-conductance constrictions. By selection of these conductances the wrist is progammed, much as an analog computer is programmed. We characterize mathematically the range of control laws such a device can compute.

Passive Robotics: An Exploration of Mechanical Computation

Active electrosense is a non-visual, short range sensing system used by weakly electric fish, enabling such fish to locate and identify objects in total darkness. Here we report initial findings from the use of active electrosense for object localization during underwater teleoperation with a virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD). The advantage of electrolocating with a VR system is that it naturally allows for aspects of the task that are difficult for a person to perform to be allocated to the computer. However, interpreting weak and incomplete patterns in the incoming data is something that people are typically far better at than computers. To achieve human-computer synergy, we integrated an active electrosense underwater robot with the Oculus Rift HMD. The virtual environment contains a visualization of the electric images of the objects surrounding the robot as well as various virtual fixtures that guide users to regions of higher information value. Initial user testing shows that these fixtures significantly reduce the time taken to localize an object, but may not increase the accuracy of the position estimate. Our results highlight the advantages of translating the unintuitive physics of electrolocation to an intuitive visual representation for accomplishing tasks in environments where imaging systems fail, such as in dark or turbid water.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3190/12/1/014001/pdf

Michael A. Peshkin

Papers

Multiple Fingers – One Gestalt

Calibration and parameter identification of a 6-DOF robot using a single radial-distance transducer

Erratum: Design of an active one-degree-of-freedom lower-limb exoskeleton with inertia compensation (International Journal of Robotics Research (2010) DOI: 10.1177/0278364910385730)

Passive Robotics: An Exploration of Mechanical Computation

Human-in-the-loop active electrosense