Showing papers in "Robotics and Autonomous Systems in 2015"

TL;DR: This paper presents a portable, assistive, soft robotic glove designed to augment hand rehabilitation for individuals with functional grasp pathologies that has the potential to increase user freedom and independence through its portable waist belt pack and open palm design.

TL;DR: Current state-of-the-art of manipulation and grasping applications that involve artificial sense of touch that involve algorithms and tactile feedback-based control systems that exploit signals from the sensors are reviewed.

TL;DR: A systematic overview of the assistive strategies utilized by active locomotion-augmentation orthoses and exoskeletons is provided, based on the literature collected from Web of Science and Scopus.

TL;DR: The present review discusses iron toxicity in plants with regard to plant growth and metabolism, metal interaction, iron-acquisition mechanisms, biofortification of iron, plant-iron homeostasis, gene function in crop improvement, and micronutrient interactions.

TL;DR: An explicit analysis of the existing methods of semantic mapping is sought, and the several algorithms are categorized according to their primary characteristics, namely scalability, inference model, temporal coherence and topological map usage.

TL;DR: In this article, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects, and ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent and future research on humanrobot communication.

TL;DR: A light-weight active orthosis endowed with two series elastic actuators for hip flexion-extension assistance providing lower-limb movement assistance in locomotion-related tasks and the overall system usability was proved by tests with a healthy subject.

TL;DR: A review of existing sensor fusion methods for wearable robots, both stationary Ones such as rehabilitation exoskeletons and portable ones such as active prostheses and full-body exoskeleton, and four approaches to combining multiple modalities are presented.

TL;DR: A nonlinear controller adopting Lyapunov’s direct method and backstepping technique is proposed for under-actuated AUV, based on the Line-of-Sight guidance built in a moving Frenet–Serret frame, which enables a smooth continuous transition between two configurations in a synthesized controller.

TL;DR: A novel, fabric-based, flexible, and stretchable tactile sensor, which is capable of seamlessly covering natural shapes, and the construction of a wearable tactile dataglove with 54 tactile cells and embedded data acquisition electronics is described.

TL;DR: This paper reviews the main solutions presented in the last fifteen years of topological mapping and localization methods, and classify them in accordance to the kind of image descriptor employed, including global, local, BoW and combinations.

TL;DR: The development of a similar capacity in a robot to "understand" the intended meaning of touch has the potential to significantly improve the future success of intuitive human-robot interaction.

TL;DR: This paper develops a new algorithm based on Bacterial Foraging Optimization (BFO) technique which finds a path towards the target and avoiding the obstacles using particles which are randomly distributed on a circle around a robot.

TL;DR: This paper presents a fully portable hip-assistance exosuit that uses a backpack frame to attach to the torso, onto which is mounted a spooled-webbing actuator that connects to the back of the users thigh.

TL;DR: Intelligent Bidirectional-R RT* (IB-RRT*) is introduced which is an improved variant of the optimal RRT* and bidirectional version of RRT*, and is specially designed for complex cluttered environments and introduces intelligent sample insertion heuristic for fast convergence to the optimal path solution using uniform sampling heuristics.

TL;DR: A Willow Garage PR2 robot is augmented with a pair of SynTouch BioTac sensors to capture rich tactile signals during the execution of four exploratory procedures on 60 household objects and several machine-learning algorithms were developed to discover the meaning of each adjective from the robot's sensory data.

TL;DR: In this paper, optimal three-dimensional paths are generated offline for waypoint guidance of a miniature Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and the dynamic modeling of this novel miniature AUV is derived.

TL;DR: The results indicate that the compliant knee exoskeleton, incorporating the proposed tele-impedance controller, can effectively generate assistive actions that are volitionally and intuitively controlled by the user's muscle activity.

TL;DR: A flexible Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) actuator designed to increase the limited displacement that these alloys can induce and the adopted strategy for both position and speed control that overcomes the hysteresis and prevents overheating the actuator is described.

TL;DR: This gait-based biometric identification method can be utilized in the detection of gender, age, race, and for authentication purposes, and can provide warnings about the potential development of diseases related to human walking.

TL;DR: The Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) Controller is proposed for navigation of single as well as multiple mobile robots in highly cluttered environment and will be able to decide its own path in all environmental conditions to reach the target efficiently.

TL;DR: This paper presents an amphibious spherical robot that consists of a sealed upper hemispheroid, two quarter spherical shells, and a plastic circular plate that has a plastic shelf for carrying the micro-robots, and four actuating units for movement.

TL;DR: The goal of the work is to support existing approaches to place recognition by learning how the visual appearance of an environment changes over time and by using this learned knowledge to predict its appearance under different environmental conditions.

TL;DR: A mathematical program to minimize the penalized earliness and tardiness of AGVs in a manufacturing system is proposed and tested and an optimization method in two stages, namely searching the solution space and finding optimal solutions are proposed.

TL;DR: A study of potential of brainwaves and their computing for providing higher security in robotic environment and selected and employed the neural network based on learning vector quantization for correct classification.

TL;DR: A new robotic platform, called the “MultiTrack”, that satisfies wall-to-wall transitions, attachment to various materials, and high payload capacity for high-rise building cleaning using robots that employs a multi-linked track mechanism and pneumatic adhesion technology.

TL;DR: The development of the CYBERLEGs Alpha-Prototype prosthesis is presented, a new transfemoral prosthesis incorporating a new variable stiffness ankle actuator based on the MACCEPA architecture, a passive knee with two locking mechanisms, and an energy transfer mechanism that harvests negative work from the knee and delivers it to the ankle to assist pushoff.

TL;DR: An approach that aims to integrate fault tolerance principles into the design of a robot real-time control architecture enhancing robots dependability and recovery using autonomy level adaptation is presented.

TL;DR: A novel method named tau-SEDS that learns stable robot motions from demonstrations on the basis of nonlinear dynamical systems is proposed, which allows learning dynamicals systems that are stable and accurate by construction without much tuning effort.

TL;DR: Simulation and experimental results show the usefulness of the new method for generating paths in rough terrains, and prove that thenew method is superior to conventional potential field method.