Showing papers in "International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems in 2017"
TL;DR: The experiments done and results achieved by the authors in the context of the FourByThree project are described, aiming to measure the trust of workers on fenceless human–robot collaboration in industrial robotic applications as well as to gauge the acceptance of different interaction mechanisms between robots and human beings.
Abstract: Human–robot collaboration is a key factor for the development of factories of the future, a space in which humans and robots can work and carry out tasks together. Safety is one of the most critica...
146 citations
TL;DR: The present article covers the rapidly evolving area of wearable exoskeletons in a holistic manner, for both medical and non-medical applications, so that relevant current developments and future issues can be addressed.
Abstract: With the recent progress in personal care robots, interest in wearable exoskeletons has been increasing due to the demand for assistive technologies generally and specifically to meet the concerns ...
128 citations
TL;DR: In virtual hand control experiments conducted with an amputee to evaluate the proposed virtual hand’s operability, the subject successfully performed stable opening and closing with high discrimination rates, indicating that the proposed system can be used to improve MyoBock hand control operation both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Abstract: This work was partially supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists B Number 26730111 and a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research C Number 26462242.
86 citations
TL;DR: This article presents a review on trends in modular reconfigurable robots, comparing the evolution of the features of the most significant robots over the years and focusing on the latest designs.
Abstract: This article presents a review on trends in modular reconfigurable robots, comparing the evolution of the features of the most significant robots over the years and focusing on the latest designs. These features are reconfiguration, docking, degrees of freedom, locomotion, control, communications, size, and powering. For each feature, some of the most relevant designs are presented and the current trends in the design are discussed.
79 citations
TL;DR: The optimization parameter of a bidirectional soft actuator is presented and it is found that the top wedged angle has a significant effect on the outward bending of the actuator when it is deflated, and 15° was found to be optimal for bending into a larger gripping space.
Abstract: This article presented the optimization parameter of a bidirectional soft actuator and evaluated the properties of the actuator. The systematic simulation was conducted to investigate the effect of...
74 citations
TL;DR: A novel attempt at exploiting compliance and dexterity to develop a manipulator for an assistive application, in particular, a shower arm to assist the elderly in the bathing task using multiagent reinforcement learning.
Abstract: Manipulators based on soft robotic technologies exhibit compliance and dexterity which ensures safe human–robot interaction. This article is a novel attempt at exploiting these desirable properties...
73 citations
TL;DR: This article deals with methods of navigation and mapping of mobile robots in an indoor environment, for example, laboratories, building corridors, and so on, through the application of potential field method and its transformation into the topological map.
Abstract: This article deals with methods of navigation and mapping of mobile robots in an indoor environment, for example, laboratories, building corridors, and so on. It explains the proposed solution of g...
69 citations
TL;DR: In this method, color correction based on magnitude stretching is carried out first, image enhancement is then derived from an intensity-guided operation that concurrently improves the contrast and saturation qualities and mitigates the heavy computational burden arising from the need to transform the source color space into an alternative color space in conventional approaches.
Abstract: Digital color images are capable of presenting hue, saturation, and brightness perceptions. Therefore, quality improvement of color images should be taken into account to enhance all three stimuli....
69 citations
TL;DR: The 2-year iroboapp research project aims at devising path planning algorithms for large grid maps with much faster execution times while tolerating very small slacks with respect to the optimal path.
Abstract: This article presents the results of the 2-year iroboapp research project that aims at devising path planning algorithms for large grid maps with much faster execution times while tolerating very s...
61 citations
TL;DR: This article presents a test bed for comprehensive study of a cable-driven hyper-redundant robot in terms of mechanical design, kinematics analysis, and experimental verification that has fine position accuracy, flexibility with mean position error less than 2%, and good load capacity.
Abstract: This article presents a test bed for comprehensive study of a cable-driven hyper-redundant robot in terms of mechanical design, kinematics analysis, and experimental verification. To design the hyp...
59 citations
TL;DR: The presented concept for autonomous mobile manipulation is implemented exemplary for industrial manipulation tasks and proven by real-world application in a water pump production site and has also been applied to other robotic systems and other domains for planetary exploration with a rover.
Abstract: This work presents a concept for autonomous mobile manipulation in industrial environments. Utilizing autonomy enables an unskilled human worker to easily configure a complex robotics system in a setup phase before carrying out fetch and carry operations in the execution phase. In order to perform the given tasks in real industrial production sites, we propose a robotic system consisting of a mobile platform, a torque-controlled manipulator, and an additional sensor head. Multiple sensors are attached which allow for perception of the environment and the objects to be manipulated. This is essential for coping with uncertainties in real-world application. In order to provide an easy-to-use and flexible system, we present a modular software concept which is handled and organized by a hierarchical flow control depending on the given task and environmental requirements. The presented concept for autonomous mobile manipulation is implemented exemplary for industrial manipulation tasks and proven by real-world ...
TL;DR: This article divides the current studies on the tactile object recognition into three subcategories and detailed analysis has been put forward on them, and discusses some advanced topics such as visual–tactile fusion, exploratory procedure, and data sets.
Abstract: Conventional visual perception technology is subject to many restrictions, such as illumination, background clutter, and occlusion. Many intrinsic properties of objects, like stiffness, hardness, a...
TL;DR: This work presents a passive, soft robotic gripper that requires power to open and close but not to maintain a grip, which can be problematic in environments with limited energy availability (e.g. solar or battery power).
Abstract: Soft robotic grippers are advantageous for tasks in which a robot comes into close contact with a human, must handle a delicate object, or needs to conform to an object. Most soft robotic grippers,...
TL;DR: This article explains in detail how the proposed semantic approach for multimodal interaction between humans and industrial robots has been implemented in two real industrial cases in which a robot and a worker collaborate in assembly and deburring operations.
Abstract: This article presents a semantic approach for multimodal interaction between humans and industrial robots to enhance the dependability and naturalness of the collaboration between them in real indu...
TL;DR: This article presents a compact tricopter configuration tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle with full modes of flight from the rotor mode to the fixed-wing mode and vice versa and indicates the satisfactory performance of the control allocation method and flight strategy.
Abstract: Tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles have attracted increasing attention due to their ability to perform vertical take-off and landing and their high-speed cruising abilities, thereby presenting broad application prospects. Considering portability and applications in tasks characterized by constrained or small scope areas, this article presents a compact tricopter configuration tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle with full modes of flight from the rotor mode to the fixed-wing mode and vice versa. The unique multiple modes make the tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle a multi-input multi-output, non-affine, multi-channel cross coupling, and nonlinear system. Considering these characteristics, a control allocation method is designed to make the controller adaptive to the full modes of flight. To reduce the cost, the accurate dynamic model of the tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle is not obtained, so a full-mode flight strategy is designed in view of this situation. An autonomous flight test was conducted, and t...
TL;DR: Results indicate the effectiveness and robustness to parameter uncertainties and external disturbances of the proposed approach to three-dimensional path following control for underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles in the presence of ocean current.
Abstract: This article addresses the problem of three-dimensional path following control for underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles in the presence of ocean current. Firstly, three-dimensional path fol...
TL;DR: An end-to-end deep vision network model to predict possible good grasps from real-world images in real time and can assist the robot to learn the graspable part of the object from the image in a fast manner is proposed.
Abstract: Grasping has always been a great challenge for robots due to its lack of the ability to well understand the perceived sensing data. In this work, we propose an end-to-end deep vision network model ...
TL;DR: This article proposes to encode the relative position of visual words using a simple but very compact method called sliding coordinates coding (SCC), which is more compact than many of the spatial or spatial–temporal pooling methods in the literature.
Abstract: Human action recognition remains challenging in realistic videos, where scale and viewpoint changes make the problem complicated. Many complex models have been developed to overcome these difficult...
TL;DR: The proposed model is used to construct an algorithm for calculating control actions for trajectories characterizing the high maneuverability of the mobile robot.
Abstract: In this article, a dynamical model for controlling an omniwheel mobile robot is presented. The proposed model is used to construct an algorithm for calculating control actions for trajectories char...
TL;DR: The availability of all visual cues with the help of pixel-level semantic information is analyzed and a new visual odometry method that combines feature-based and alignment-based visual Odometry methods with one optimization pipeline is proposed.
Abstract: Visual odometry plays an important role in urban autonomous driving cars. Feature-based visual odometry methods sample the candidates randomly from all available feature points, while alignment-bas...
TL;DR: A novel multimodal interaction mechanism is designed by which customers can conveniently interact with the robot either in speech or via a mobile application, and the results of both simulated experiments and field tests confirm the feasibility, stability, and safety of the robot system.
Abstract: This paper reports the project of a shopping mall service robot, named KeJia, which is designed for customer guidance, providing information and entertainments in a real shopping mall environment. ...
TL;DR: A road detection method based on the fusion of Lidar and image data under the framework of conditional random field and the scores computed from the Adaboost classifier are used as the unary potential.
Abstract: In this article, we propose a road detection method based on the fusion of Lidar and image data under the framework of conditional random field. Firstly, Lidar point clouds are projected into the m...
TL;DR: A sliding mode control scheme for the autopilot system of a ship is presented, which also incorporates actuator saturation, and the proposed controller is more efficient as compared to the traditional and saturation function methods.
Abstract: In this article, a sliding mode control scheme for the autopilot system of a ship is presented, which also incorporates actuator saturation. Under the designed controller, the actuator doesn’t ente...
TL;DR: A novel method of indoor mobile robot navigation that fuses the data of odometry and electronic compass for navigation and includes two calibration methods and a fusion algorithm, which proves the good performance of the proposed approach.
Abstract: A novel method of indoor mobile robot navigation is presented. The proposed approach fuses the data of odometry and electronic compass for navigation. It includes two calibration methods and a fusi...
TL;DR: An indoor exploration algorithm for mobile robots using a hierarchical structure that fuses several convolutional neural network layers with decision-making process is described and Gaussian process latent variable model is used to visualize the feature map of last Convolutional layer, which proves the effectiveness of this deep convolution neural network mode.
Abstract: The exploration problem of mobile robots aims to allow mobile robots to explore an unknown environment. We describe an indoor exploration algorithm for mobile robots using a hierarchical structure ...
TL;DR: The experiments carried out in a real indoor environment show high robustness of the proposed landmark design and recognition scheme to the illumination condition, which leads to reliable and accurate mobile robot localization.
Abstract: This article presents a self-localization scheme for indoor mobile robot navigation based on reliable design and recognition of artificial visual landmarks. Each landmark is patterned with a set of...
TL;DR: A systematic and practical calibration method for an industrial robot to improve its absolute accuracy and an improved sequential forward floating search algorithm is proposed to select an optimal subset of configurations from a large pool of measured poses based on the D-Optimality.
Abstract: This article presents a systematic and practical calibration method for an industrial robot to improve its absolute accuracy. The forward kinematics is established based on the global product-of-ex...
TL;DR: The purpose of the presented article is to offer a comprehensive study of determining the inertia moments of the hexacopter using a simplified pendulum method, taking into consideration the effect of mass distribution and center of gravity changes, which are a result of the continuous movement of the manipulator during the Hexacopter motion in the air.
Abstract: In this article, the dynamics model of a hexacopter equipped with a robotic arm has been formulated using Newton–Euler’s method and its stability was investigated. For disturbances emulation, a sim...
TL;DR: Results show that robot performance under Port Forwarding is on par with cloud-based solutions, but it required a fraction of setup time, and the authors developed a set of shell scripts that monitor the Internet addresses of all networked components and auto-update Port forwarding settings when they change, solving this issue.
Abstract: In a Robot Operating System (ROS) application, robot software is often distributed across multiple networked components, forming the ROS network, where every component acts as server and/or a client, and publishing and/or receiving robot data simultaneously For indoor robots, a local ROS network, through a Wi-Fi hotspot, is sufficient But for outdoor robots, a remote ROS network is needed to connect the ROS application to the cloud Although a number of cloud-based solutions support this, implementing them is challenging, as they need to be configured to facilitate ROS's unique, multidirectional, and simultaneous flow of robot data This article presents Port Forwarding as an alternative approach, which offers a private, secured, and a direct ROS-to-ROS, eliminating the need for a dedicated middleware and its configuration and setup complexities But Port Forwarding has its own challenges; chiefly, the beforehand knowledge of Internet addresses of all networked components and the need to update port for
TL;DR: This work establishes robotic teleoperation systems with a wearable multimodal fusion device integrated with 18 low-cost inertial and magnetic measurement units, which cover all segments of the arm and hand and fully realized with a user-friendly human–machine interaction interface.
Abstract: Teleoperation is of great importance in the area of robotics especially when people’s presence at the robot working space is unavailable. It provides an alternative to employ human intelligence in ...