INTRODUCTION: Brief History. Multifingered Hands and Dextrous Manipulation. Outline of the Book. Bibliography. RIGID BODY MOTION: Rigid Body Transformations. Rotational Motion in R3. Rigid Motion in R3. Velocity of a Rigid Body. Wrenches and Reciprocal Screws. MANIPULATOR KINEMATICS: Introduction. Forward Kinematics. Inverse Kinematics. The Manipulator Jacobian. Redundant and Parallel Manipulators. ROBOT DYNAMICS AND CONTROL: Introduction. Lagrange's Equations. Dynamics of Open-Chain Manipulators. Lyapunov Stability Theory. Position Control and Trajectory Tracking. Control of Constrained Manipulators. MULTIFINGERED HAND KINEMATICS: Introduction to Grasping. Grasp Statics. Force-Closure. Grasp Planning. Grasp Constraints. Rolling Contact Kinematics. HAND DYNAMICS AND CONTROL: Lagrange's Equations with Constraints. Robot Hand Dynamics. Redundant and Nonmanipulable Robot Systems. Kinematics and Statics of Tendon Actuation. Control of Robot Hands. NONHOLONOMIC BEHAVIOR IN ROBOTIC SYSTEMS: Introduction. Controllability and Frobenius' Theorem. Examples of Nonholonomic Systems. Structure of Nonholonomic Systems. NONHOLONOMIC MOTION PLANNING: Introduction. Steering Model Control Systems Using Sinusoids. General Methods for Steering. Dynamic Finger Repositioning. FUTURE PROSPECTS: Robots in Hazardous Environments. Medical Applications for Multifingered Hands. Robots on a Small Scale: Microrobotics. APPENDICES: Lie Groups and Robot Kinematics. A Mathematica Package for Screw Calculus. Bibliography. Index Each chapter also includes a Summary, Bibliography, and Exercises

http://www.cds.caltech.edu/%7Emurray/books/MLS/pdf/mls94-complete.pdf

A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation

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

A text that makes the mathematical underpinnings of robot motion accessible and relates low-level details of implementation to high-level algorithmic concepts. Robot motion planning has become a major focus of robotics. Research findings can be applied not only to robotics but to planning routes on circuit boards, directing digital actors in computer graphics, robot-assisted surgery and medicine, and in novel areas such as drug design and protein folding. This text reflects the great advances that have taken place in the last ten years, including sensor-based planning, probabalistic planning, localization and mapping, and motion planning for dynamic and nonholonomic systems. Its presentation makes the mathematical underpinnings of robot motion accessible to students of computer science and engineering, rleating low-level implementation details to high-level algorithmic concepts.

Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations

Methods for steering systems with nonholonomic c.onstraints between arbitrary configurations are investigated. Suboptimal trajectories are derived for systems that are not in canonical form. Systems in which it takes more than one level of bracketing to achieve controllability are considered. The trajectories use sinusoids at integrally related frequencies to achieve motion at a given bracketing level. A class of systems that can be steered using sinusoids (claimed systems) is defined. Conditions under which a class of two-input systems can be converted into this form are given. >

/pdf/nonholonomic-motion-planning-steering-using-sinusoids-3lyefe031n.pdf

Nonholonomic motion planning: steering using sinusoids

Continuum robotics has rapidly become a rich and diverse area of research, with many designs and applications demonstrated. Despite this diversity in form and purpose, there exists remarkable similarity in the fundamental simplified kinematic models that have been applied to continuum robots. However, this can easily be obscured, especially to a newcomer to the field, by the different applications, coordinate frame choices, and analytical formalisms employed. In this paper we review several modeling approaches in a common frame and notational convention, illustrating that for piecewise constant curvature, they produce identical results. This discussion elucidates what has been articulated in different ways by a number of researchers in the past several years, namely that constant-curvature kinematics can be considered as consisting of two separate submappings: one that is general and applies to all continuum robots, and another that is robot-specific. These mappings are then developed both for the single-section and for the multi-section case. Similarly, we discuss the decomposition of differential kinematics (the robotâ??s Jacobian) into robot-specific and robot-independent portions. The paper concludes with a perspective on several of the themes of current research that are shaping the future of continuum robotics.

/pdf/design-and-kinematic-modeling-of-constant-curvature-4wrx5stlzx.pdf

Design and Kinematic Modeling of Constant Curvature Continuum Robots: A Review

This paper presents a robust velocity estimation algorithm applicable to low-cost monocular platform with a tri-axial gyroscope. The algorithm is developed based on PX4FLOW platform which is an open software and open hardware solution for monocular speed estimation. The paper provides three main contributions. The first is the improved robustness achieved by various methods including feature block selection, feed-forward rotation, motion compensation, failure case detection and filtering. The second contribution is the improved performance in terms of resolution and search range achieved by adaptive frame interval and advanced search algorithm. The final contribution is a systematical strategy for parameter selection to fully utilize the hardware resources and optimize the performance in different contexts. The performance was benchmarked against the PX4FLOW and GPS. Results indicated that the proposed algorithm achieved levels of robustness exceeding that of PX4FLOW in measuring velocity. Also, the integrated trajectory agreed with the position calculated by an on-board GPS system.

A low-cost and robust optical flow CMOS camera for velocity estimation

A method of control for seismic-excited buildings or bridge structures using variable dampers is presented. The control method is based on the theory of variable structure system (VSS) or the sliding mode control (SMC) and the earthquake ground motion is taken into account in the design of the controllers. A simulation study using a continuous girder bridge is conducted to examine the effectiveness of the control algorithm in reducing both the absolute acceleration of the bridge girder and the relative displacement between the girder and the supports. Simulation results indicate that the performance of the control method presented is excellent.

Hybrid Control of Seismic-Excited Bridge Structures Using Variable Dampers

This paper presents a new method to analyze the kinematics of a widely-used commercial hybrid manipulator IRB260 from the ABB Company. This manipulator includes two parallel four-bar mechanisms that make the kinematics and dynamic analysis complicated. In this paper, the rigorous analytical method is totally based on the exponential coordinate description and the screw theory. This method has created the virtual open-chain manipulator that is equivalent to the hybrid manipulator. Then the kinematics can be solved using the routine steps for the virtual open-chain manipulators. The simulation results show that this new method results in the correct kinematics of this hybrid manipulator.

New method for kinematic analysis of a hybrid manipulator

Increasing demands on precision manufacturing of parts with freeform surfaces have been observed in the last several years. Although significant progress has been made in precision machining of freeform surfaces, inspection of such surfaces remains a difficult problem. A crucial issue in surface inspection is localisation of the design coordinate frame on a measurement machine frame. This paper presents a cyclic optimisation, where a closed-form solution is obtained in each iteration, for the localisation. The computational efficiency, robustness to the initial conditions and accuracy of the algorithm are assessed via experiments, and in the localisation process, the computation of the closest point is a vital step. The data structures of approximated nearest nodes and topological neighbour facets are combined to speed up the closest point calculation. The simulation experiments indicate that the presented method is effective.

Zexiang Li

Papers

A low-cost and robust optical flow CMOS camera for velocity estimation

Hybrid Control of Seismic-Excited Bridge Structures Using Variable Dampers

New method for kinematic analysis of a hybrid manipulator

Cyclic optimisation for localisation in freeform surface inspection

Analysis of tooth undercutting in noncircular gears based on numerical computation model of shaping