The paper is aimed at generating optimal swing motions during the single-support phase of sagittal gait. Unlike the previous Part 1 which deals with passive motions, all joints of the biped are assumed to be active in the present Part 2. The final conditions specify an impactless heel-touch in order to avoid a destabilizing effect on the biped motion. As the biped is essentially submitted to gravity forces, the motion is generated by minimizing the joint actuating torques. Feasible motions are defined by state inequality constraints limiting joint motions, and defining foot clearance and obstacle avoidance during the swing. The optimization problem is dealt with using Pontryagin's Maximum Principle. A final two-point boundary value problem is solved by implementing a shooting method. The approach presented is illustrated by various numerical simulations applying to a seven-body planar biped which has four or five active joints during the swing phase.

A unified force control scheme for an autonomous underwater robotic system is proposed in this paper. This robotic system is composed of a six degree-of-freedom autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and a robotic arm that is mounted on the AUV. A unified force control approach, which combines impedance control with hybrid position/force control by means of fuzzy switching to perform autonomous underwater manipulation, is presented in this paper. This controller requires a dynamic model of the underwater vehicle-manipulator system. However, it does not require any model of the environment and therefore will have the potential to be useful in underwater tasks where the environment is generally unknown. The proposed approach combines the advantages of impedance control with hybrid control so that both smooth contact transition and force trajectory tracking can be achieved. In the absence of any functional autonomous underwater vehicle-manipulator system that can be used to verify the proposed controller, extensive computer simulations are performed and the results are presented in the paper.

It is known that it is impossible to select fixed gains for a PD controller that will critically damp the response to disturbances for all configurations of a given robot system. Because of this the potential for overshoot is always present and cannot be avoided unless the system is severely overdamped. This is not necessarily a practical solution and can be an economically unacceptable approach. On the other hand, however, if overshoot is permissible to some degree for some systems in the case of conventional Serial robots it is still prohibited in the case of Parallel robots as it may easily bring the robot to one of its possible singular configurations, causing damage to the system. This paper introduces a new algorithm for the design of PD controllers that ensures uniform and fast dynamic responses, which are free from overshoots for all robot configurations. The technique also satisfies general stability requirements for the system.

Autonomous walking bipedal machines, possibly useful for rehabilitation and entertainment purposes, need a high energy efficiency, offered by the concept of ‘Passive Dynamic Walking' (exploitation of the natural dynamics of the robot). 2D passive dynamic bipeds have been shown to be inherently stable, but in the third dimension two problematic degrees of freedom are introduced: yaw and roll.

We propose a design for a 3D biped with a pelvic body as a passive dynamic compensator, which will compensate for the undesired yaw and roll motion, and allow the rest of the robot to move as if it were a 2D machine. To test our design, we perform numerical simulations on a multibody model of the robot. With limit cycle analysis we calculate the stability of the robot when walking at its natural speed.

The simulation shows that the compensator, indeed, effectively compensates for both the yaw and the roll motion, and that the walker is stable.

This paper presents the work on developing a sliding-leg tripod as a programmable add-on device for manufacturing. The purpose is to enhance the capabilities of any machine by providing it with a more flexible range of motion. This device can be used as a toolhead for CNC machine tools and robots, or as a work stage for coordinate measuring machines and laser scanning systems. In this paper, system modelling, analysis and control of this device is presented. System modeling includes mobility study, kinematic model and inverse kinematics. System analysis includes workspace analysis, transmission ratio and stiffness analysis. System control includes path planning, joint space control and Cartesian space prediction. It is shown that the proposed device can provide flexibility and dexterity to machines.

The paper addresses a problem of “in-hand” locating parts of different shapes in robotic grasping. The goal of the process is to locate a part of an arbitrary shape from an imprecisely determined initial position within a gripper to a final prescribed one. Two possible approaches to solve the problem are considered: non-adaptive, using ordinary rigid jaws of gripper and, adaptive, using an adaptive jaw which improves the performance of the locating process. The latter approach is proposed to be solved by a new type of grasping mechanism. Its theoretical analysis enables to obtain formal conditions for part behavior during the successive steps of the locating process. This process was simulated and then experimentally investigated on an actual gripper model. The proposed new class of mechanisms opens a promising avenue to the creation of a practical class of universal robotic grippers for industry.

Only one parallel wrist with three equal legs containing just revolute pairs has been already presented in the literature. This parallel wrist is overconstrained, i.e., it involves three degrees of freedom required to orientate the end effector by using repetitions of constraints. The overconstrained mechanisms have the drawback of jamming or undergoing high internal loads when geometric errors occur. This paper presents a new parallel wrist, named 3-RUU wrist. The 3-RUU wrist is not overconstrained. It has three equal legs just involving revolute pairs and actuators adjacent to the frame and uses an architecture (3-RUU) already employed to obtain manipulators that make the end effector translate. The 3-RUU wrist kinematic analysis is addressed. This analysis shows that the new parallel wrist can reach singular configurations (translation singularities) in which the spherical constraint between end effector and frame fails. The singularity condition that makes finding all the 3-RUU wrist singular configurations possible is written in explicit form and geometrically interpreted.

Inaccurate positioning of the robot end effector causes joint deformation as well as geometric errors when an industrial robot has a payload at its end effector. We propose a new approach of calibration which deals with joint angle dependent errors to compensate for these phenomena. To implement this method, we divided the robot workspace into several local regions, and built a calibration equation by generating the constraint conditions of the end effector's motion in each local region using a three-dimensional position measurement system. The parameter errors obtained this way were interpolated using the Radial Basis Function Network (RBFN) so as to estimate calibration errors in the regions that we did not measure. We used this technique to improve the performance of a six DOF industrial robot used for arc welding.

This paper illustrates basic concepts of real-time control systems through the application of a real-time single-processor computing environment for the control of a robotic arm. The paper describes elements for the selection of the real-time architecture, the control algorithm and the graphical user interface. The system provides an opportunity for users to verify the robot performance by changing on-line the controller parameters and the shape of the desired motion.

The estimation of the 2D relative motion of an indoor robot using monocular vision is presented. The camera calibration is known, and its motion is limited to be planar. These constraints are included in the robust regression of epipolar geometry from point matches. Motion is derived from the epipolar geometry. A sequence of 54 real images is used to test the algorithm. Accurate motion, both in rotation and translation angles of 0.4 and 1.7 deg, is successfully derived.

Herein is proposed a concise algorithmic procedure for deriving a minimum l∞-norm solution of the system of consistent linear equations Ax=b, where A is a m×n matrix, b is given as a m×1 vector and x is a n×1 unknown vector. The proposed algorithm is developed based on the geometrical analysis of the characteristics of the minimum infinity-norm solution. The proposed algorithm is well-structured so that it may be implemented easily through simple linear algebraic manipulation. For the case of n>m, the basic idea of the method is extended to finding internally mapped vertices when a n dimensional polytope is transformed into m dimensional polytope through consistent linear mapping A. The proposed method is applied to the task velocity analysis for robot manipulators with joint velocity constraints.