As various robots are anticipated to coexist with humans in the near future, safe manipulation in unknown, cluttered environments becomes an important issue. Manipulation in an unknown environment, however, has been proven to be NP-Hard and the risk of unexpected human--robot collision hampers the dawning of the era of human--robot coexistence. We propose a non-contact-based sensitive skin as a means to provide safe manipulation hardware and interleaving planning between the workspace and the configuration space as software to solve manipulation problems in unknown, crowded environments. Novelty of the paper resides in demonstration of real time and yet complete path planning in an uncertain and crowded environment. To that end, we introduce the framework of the sensor-based interleaving planner (SBIP) whereby search completeness and safe manipulation are both guaranteed in cluttered environments. We study an interleaving mechanism between sensation in a workspace and execution in the corresponding configuration space for real-time planning in uncertain environments, thus the name interleaving planner implies.

Applications of the proposed system include manipulators of a humanoid robot, surgical manipulators, and robotic manipulators working in hazardous and uncertain environments such as underwater, unexplored planets, and unstructured indoor spaces.

The Derivative-free nonlinear Kalman Filter is used for developing a robust controller which can be applied to underactuated MIMO robotic systems. The control problem for underactuated robots is non-trivial and becomes further complicated if the robot is subjected to model uncertainties and external disturbances. Using differential flatness theory it is shown that the model of a closed-chain 2-DOF robotic manipulator can be transformed to linear canonical form. For the linearized equivalent of the robotic system it is shown that a state feedback controller can be designed. Since certain elements of the state vector of the linearized system cannot be measured directly, it is proposed to estimate them with the use of a novel filtering method, the so-called Derivative-free nonlinear Kalman Filter. Moreover, by redesigning the Kalman Filter as a disturbance observer, it is shown that one can estimate simultaneously external disturbance terms that affect the robotic model or disturbance terms which are associated with parametric uncertainty. The efficiency of the proposed Kalman Filter-based control scheme is tested in the case of a 2-DOF planar robotic manipulator that has the structure of a closed-chain mechanism.

Complementary filtering is a frequency based method used to design data processing algorithms exploiting signals with complementary spectra. The technique is mostly used in sensor fusion architectures, but it may also be effective in the design of state estimators. In spite of its potential in several areas of robotics, the complementary filtering paradigm is poorly used as compared to alternative time domain methods. The first part of the paper aims at reviewing the basics of complementary filtering in sensor data processing and linear systems state estimation. The second part of the paper describes how to exploit the main ideas of complementary filtering to design a depth controller for an actuator redundant autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). Unlike with alternative state space methods commonly used to address the design of control solutions for actuator redundant systems, the proposed approach allows to fully exploit the knowledge of frequency characteristics of actuators. Simulation results are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

This paper proposes a globally and exponentially convergent predictive observer for attitude and position estimation based on landmark measurements and velocity (angular and linear) readings. It is assumed that landmark measurements are available with time-delay. The maximum value of the sensor delay under which the estimation error converges to zero is calculated. Synthesis of the observer is based on a representation of rigid-body kinematics and sensor delay, formulated via ordinary and partial differential equations (ODE-PDE). Observability condition specifies necessary and sufficient landmark configuration for convergence of attitude and position estimation error to zero. Finally, for implementation purposes, a PDE-free realization of the predictive observer is proposed. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate performance and convergence properties of the predictive observer in case of a wheeled mobile robot.

A distributed coverage control scheme based on the state space model predictive control, which is known as receding horizon control (RHC) for decoupled systems, is presented. An optimal control problem is formulated for a set of decoupled robotic systems where a cost function couples the dynamical behavior of the robots. The coupling is described through a connected graph using a Voronoi diagram, where each robot is a node and the cost and constraints of the optimization problem associated with each robot are a function of its state and of the states of its neighbors. The complexity of the problem is addressed by breaking a centralized receding horizon controller into distinct RHC controllers of smaller sizes. Each RHC controller is associated with a different node and it computes the local control inputs based only on the position of the robot and that of its neighbors. The stability of the distributed scheme is analyzed and its properties compared with the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) design which has been proposed in the literature. Moreover, the proposed coverage algorithm is also applied to deploy a group of mobile robots in a desired formation pattern. The simulation results are used to illustrate the good performance of the proposed coverage control scheme.

Legged robots have the potential to navigate in more challenging terrains than wheeled robots. Unfortunately, their control is more demanding, because they have to deal with the common tasks of mapping and path planning as well as more specific issues of legged locomotion, like balancing and foothold planning. In this paper, we present the integration and the development of a stabilized vision system on the fully torque-controlled hydraulically actuated quadruped robot (HyQ). The active head added onto the robot is composed of a fast pan and tilt unit (PTU) and a high-resolution wide angle stereo camera. The PTU enables camera gaze shifting to a specific area in the environment (both to extend and refine the map) or to track an object while navigating. Moreover, as the quadruped locomotion induces strong regular vibrations, impacts or slippages on rough terrain, we took advantage of the PTU to mechanically compensate for the robot's motions. In this paper, we demonstrate the influence of legged locomotion on the quality of the visual data stream by providing a detailed study of HyQ's motions, which are compared against a rough terrain wheeled robot of the same size. Our proposed Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)-based controller allows us to decouple the camera from the robot motions. We show through experiments that, by stabilizing the image feedback, we can improve the onboard vision-based processes of tracking and mapping. In particular, during the outdoor tests on the quadruped robot, the use of our camera stabilization system improved the accuracy on the 3D maps by 25%, with a decrease of 50% of mapping failures.

This paper describes an optimized magnetic wheel solution for use in a novel grit-blasting robot intended to be used on the hulls of ships. The grit-blasting robot was designed for conducting surface operations on newly-built ships in dry yards. It can be adapted to curvatures of up to 0.833 m−1; can achieve a total payload of 120 kg and can also be steered. The proposed magnetic wheel solution for robots with such payloads and surface adaptability has not been seen in previous work.

As the magnetic force acting on a magnetic wheel is very sensitive to the working conditions, a mathematical model was built to derive the exact force requirements taking into account the mechanical structure of the robot and its disposition on the ship's hull. In this paper, the design of the wheels was optimized based on the model. Wheels were manufactured according to the optimized results and a prototype robot was constructed. The design was then validated using locomotion tests.

Collision-free motion planning of a virtual arm is an intractable task in high-interference environments. In this paper, an approach for collision-free motion planning of a virtual arm based on the forward and backward reaching inverse kinematics (FABRIK) algorithm is proposed. First, a random rotation strategy and local optimum-seeking technology are introduced to improve the FABRIK algorithm in order to avoid obstacles. The improvement FABRIK algorithm is used to design the final grasping posture of a virtual arm according the target position. Then, a bidirectional rapidly exploring random tree (Bi-RRT) algorithm is adopted to explore the process postures from a given initial posture to the final grasping posture. Different from the existing method, the proposed Bi-RRT algorithm in this paper plans the motions of a virtual arm in a seven-dimensional angle space, and the final grasping posture is automatically designed using the obstacle-avoidance FABRIK algorithm instead of the manual design. Finally, the post-processing technique is introduced to remove redundant nodes from the planned motions. This procedure has resolved the problem that the Bi-RRT algorithm is a random algorithm. The experimental results show the proposed method for collision-free motion planning of a virtual arm is feasible.

This paper presents a novel kinematic approach for controlling the end-effector of a continuum robot for in-situ repair/inspection in restricted and hazardous environments. Forward and inverse kinematic (IK) models have been developed to control the last segment of the continuum robot for performing multi-axis processing tasks using the last six Degrees of Freedom (DoF). The forward kinematics (FK) is proposed using a combination of Euler angle representation and homogeneous matrices. Due to the redundancy of the system, different constraints are proposed to solve the IK for different cases; therefore, the IK model is solved for bending and direction angles between (−π/2 to +π/2) radians. In addition, a novel method to calculate the Jacobian matrix is proposed for this type of hyper-redundant kinematics. The error between the results calculated using the proposed Jacobian algorithm and using the partial derivative equations of the FK map (with respect to linear and angular velocity) is evaluated. The error between the two models is found to be insignificant, thus, the Jacobian is validated as a method of calculating the IK for six DoF.

This paper discusses the development of an optimal wheel-torque controller for a compliant modular robot. The wheel actuators are the only actively controllable elements in this robot. For this type of robots, wheel-slip could offer a lot of hindrance while traversing on uneven terrains. Therefore, an effective wheel-torque controller is desired that will also improve the wheel-odometry and minimize power consumption. In this work, an optimal wheel-torque controller is proposed that minimizes the traction-to-normal force ratios of all the wheels at every instant of its motion. This ensures that, at every wheel, the least traction force per unit normal force is applied to maintain static stability and desired wheel speed. The lower this is, in comparison to the actual friction coefficient of the wheel-ground interface, the more margin of slip-free motion the robot can have. This formalism best exploits the redundancy offered by a modularly designed robot. This is the key novelty of this work. Extensive numerical and experimental studies were carried out to validate this controller. The robot was tested on four different surfaces and we report an overall average slip reduction of 44% and mean wheel-torque reduction by 16%.

This paper presents a novel forecasting kinematic algorithm for autonomously navigating the 3D visual window of laparoscopic minimally invasive surgical robotic system (LMISRS). By the application of the proposed technique, a constant distribution area ratio of the micro devices can be guaranteed in the visual window; real-time concurrency motion of the visual window of the laparoscope and the mark points of the instruments is realized, i.e. the visual window can keep tracking the movement of the marks automatically, so that the user does not have to switch between the master-slave controlling targets. The implementation of the new technique is summarized as follows: the robotic kinematics and space analytic geometry are thoroughly analyzed and modeled, and a “following kinematic algorithm” is proposed for the visual window of the laparoscope, which tracks the mark points of the instrument arms; a “forecasting kinematic algorithm” is established by using a combination of the “following kinematic algorithm”, the basic visual parameters of 3D visual field, the Verhulst Grey Model and the filtered amendment method. The proposed technique is verified by a series of simulations by using two groups of marks' motion trails with different sampling times, indicating that the technique is accurate, feasible and robust.

Parallel manipulators (PMs) with decoupled kinematics can be obtained by combining a translational PM (TPM) with a spherical PM (SPM) either in multiplatform architectures or in integrated more-complex architectures. Some of the latter type are inspired by the 6–4 fully parallel manipulator (6–4 FPM), whereas others of the same type are deduced by suitably combining TPMs' limbs and SPMs' limbs into more cumbersome limbs which contain more than one actuated joint. The decoupled PMs (DPMs) presented here pursue an intermediate concept between the last two which keeps all the actuators on or near to the base in a simplified architecture with only three limbs. These features preserve the lightness of the mobile masses, together with the associated good-dynamic performances, and reduce the limitations on the workspace due to the eliminated limbs and to possible limb interferences. The finite and instantaneous kinematics of the proposed DPMs is studied, thus proving the practical implementation of the proposal.

In the original version of this paper the email of the corresponding author, Reza Mahboobi Esfanjani, was given incorrectly. The correct email is [email protected].

The publisher apologises for this error.