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

If an admittance control law is properly designed, a workpiece can be guided into a future using only the contact forces for guidance Iforce-assembly). Previously, we have shown that a control law that allows force-assembly with friction can be obtained as long as the forces associated with positional misalignment are characteristic. Using an optimization procedure, a &k accommodation control law that allows force-assembly at the maximum value of friction is obtained. This single accommodation control law, however, is not unique nor is it necessarily the "best". There exists a space of accommodation control laws that will allow forceassembly at (or below) the value of friction that marginally violdes the characteristic forces condition. Here, for the purpose of the accommodation control law design, a set of linear sufficient conditions is used to generate accommodation bmis matrices. Any nonnegative linear combination of the accommodation basis matrices that, when combined, yielak a positive definite accommodation matrix, is guaranteed to provide force-assembly at (or below) the value of friction specified. 1 .O: INTRODUCTION

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel2/904/7227/00292212.pdf

The Space of Admittance Control Laws that Guarantees Force- Assembly

The author considers the situation in which the response of a manipulator to forces imposed on it is given by a user-selectable damping matrix (a six-by-six matrix which maps forces and torques into translational and rotational velocities). He then seeks to determine whether it is possible to choose the 36 matrix elements so that the forces which characterize every error condition map into the motions that correct it. He proposes three desired properties of the damping matrix: the bounded-forces, error-reduction, and nonorthogonal-motion properties. It is shown how the damping matrix most closely attaining these properties under all contact configurations can be constructed. For some tasks a 'perfect' damping matrix possessing all three properties exists, and under its direction assembly must necessarily proceed to completion. For some tasks a perfect damping matrix does not exist, and it is conjectured that the three properties may still be useful as heuristics; the damping matrix most closely attaining them will likely be appropriate to the task. To test this conjecture, the author considers the canonical peg-into-chamfered-hole task and finds that no 'perfect' damping matrix is possible. >

Programming a damping matrix for error-corrective assembly

For deactivation and decommissioning (D&D) of contaminated structures in the weapons complex, remotely operated robotic systems are expected to replace human workers from hazardous radiation and difficult work environments, while improving productivity and reducing costs. Nevertheless, the major drawback of currently available remote operation technology is that teleoperation is a slow and imprecise process, mainly due to the difficulty of transferring perception and manipulation over a remote location. To this end, this work presents a semi-automatic teleoperation system that facilitates efficient and precise teleoperation. Building upon behavior based robotic architecture and a proprietary Cobotic hand controller, two types of enhanced teleoperation tele-autonomy and tele-collaboration – are implemented.

Semi-automatic teleoperation for D&D

Reachable grasps on a polygon

This paper presents the design and simulation of a cyclic robot for lower-limb exercise robots. The robot is designed specifically for cyclic motions and the high power nature of lower-limb interaction—as such, it breaks from traditional robotics wisdom by intentionally traveling through singularities and incorporating large inertia. Such attributes lead to explicit design considerations. Results from a simulation show that the specific design requires only a reasonably sized damper and motor. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4004648]

/pdf/a-cyclic-robot-for-lower-limb-exercise-4wniif2al9.pdf

Michael A. Peshkin

Papers

The Space of Admittance Control Laws that Guarantees Force- Assembly

Programming a damping matrix for error-corrective assembly

Semi-automatic teleoperation for D&D

Reachable grasps on a polygon

A Cyclic Robot for Lower Limb Exercise