It is reported by the British Aerospace (BAE Systems) that their researchers have developed a revolutionary airborne computer system that, they claim, can land aircraft safely without the need of human air traffic controllers. The new system will allow a pilot to determine an aircraft's landing by pressing a button in the cockpit to initiate the computer system.

A two-straight-legged walking mechanism with flat feet is designed and built to study the passive dynamic gait. It is shown that the mechanism having flat feet can exhibit passive dynamic walking as those with curved feet, but the walking efficiency is significantly lower. It is also shown that the balancing mass and its orientation are effective for controlling side-to-side rocking and yaw, which have significant effects on steady walking. The effects of various parameters on the gait patterns are also studied. lt is shown that changes in the ramp angle have the most dominant effect on the gait pattern as compared with the changes in the hip mass, ramp surface friction and size of the flat feet. More specifically, as the ramp angle increases, the step length increases while the range of the side-to side rocking angle decreases and the step length dictates the walking speed and the gravitational power. Another finding, is that adding a hip mass improves the walking efficiency by allowing the mechanism to walk on a flatter ramp. This research enables us to gain a better understanding of the mechanics of walking. Such an understanding will have a direct impact on better design of prostheses and on the active control aspects of bipedal robots.

This paper deals with the design and development of a new perception system for controlling a set of ultrasonic transducers working at two different frequencies generated by a digital signal processor (DSP). Data gathering speed is increased by the simultaneous firing of sonars without crosstalk problems. The software and hardware implementation are presented as well as the results from the calibration process and the integration on board the mobile robot RAM-2. Finally, a demonstration of the use of the proposed equipment to wall-following via a fuzzy controller is described.

This paper deseribes the control of multi-arm co-operating manipulator systems handling a common object. Inverse dynamics controllers with motive force compensation are developed for the co-operating fixed-base, free-floating, and free-flying space manipulator systems. Further, the relative performances of all the three configurations are compared on two tracking problems.

This paper presents the basis of a mathematical model for simulation of planar flexible-link manipulators, taking into consideration the effect of higher stiffness zones at the link tips. The proposed formulation is a variation of the finite segment multi-body dynamics approach. The formulation employs a consistent mass matrix in order to provide better approximation than the traditional lumped masses often encountered in the finite segment approach. The formulation is implemented into a computational code and tested through three examples; cantilever beam, rotating beam and three-link manipulator. In these examples, the length of the rigid tips at both sides of each link ranges from 0% to 6.25% of the whole link length. The zones of higher stiffness at the link tips are treated as short rigid zones. The effect of the rigid zones is averaged along with some portions of the flexible links, thereby allowing further simplification of the dynamic equations of motion. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling technique and show the importance of not ignoring the effect of the rigid tips.

Vision-aided flexible link robot positoning using the Camera Space Manipulation (CSM) method is developed. The primary motivation for this work is to use an autonomous vision-aided robotic system to pick-up and accurately move a flexible object that it encounters. The work consists of analytical and experimental investigation of the performance of CSM for a kinematic model of the PUMA manipulator with a flexible structure at the wrist which accounts for the gravitation. Trade-offs between camera view parameters and axial deflection model parameters were investigated. View parameter reestimation and maneuvering resulted a very accurate placement of the end-effector at the target.

In this paper, we propose a new method to learn a multi-fingered hand grasping posture with little knowledge about the task and few sensing capabilities. The developed model is composed of two stages. The first is dedicated to the finger inverse kinematics learning in order to provide the fingertip-desired position. This function is fulfilled by modular neural network architecture. Following the concept of reinforcement learning, a second neural model dealing with noisy sensing information is used to search the space of hand configuration. Simulation results show a good learning of grasping postures with five fingers and different noise levels.

This paper explores a new type of a parallel platform human interface manipulator based on virtual reality (VR) for mechanism design applications. A motion control of a six-link robot manipulator actuated by three active joints is presented here. The main components of the system include a user interface, a software simulating the environment, and a VR control system. The model of the VR system is built based on a force feedback behavior that enables the operator to feel the actual force feedback from the virtual environment just as he/she would from the real environment. A primary stabilizing controller is used to develop a haptic interface device where realistic simulations of the dynamic interaction forces between a human operator and the simulated virtual object/mechanism is required. The stability and performance of the system are studied and analyzed based on the Nyquist stability criterion. Experiments on cutting virtual clay are used to validate the theoretical developments. It was shown that the experimental and theoretical results are in good agreement.

Ball passing is an elementary and frequently employed human soccer skill. This paper examines the realization and visualization of ball passing, a low level move-to-ball behavior of a soccer robot, in a robot soccer game. A case study of three mechanically identical mobile robots with a formation ready to pass a ball cyclically in a zigzag pattern is examined. We build a control command driven mobile robot motion simulator with a controller and dynamics of mobile robots, not only nonholonomic kinematic constraints to simulate the motion of a soccer robot driven by wheels torques to generate wheels accelerations, to update the robot position and orientation at successive time instants. Kick motion follows a physical law, and a simplified collision check and response model is utilized for the efficient detection of the hitting a robot with the ball or other robots. The realization of specific ball passing strategy to drive each soccer robot in a position to receive a pass includes three levels of organization, coordination, and execution: careful integrated design of a dynamic formation and role change scheme, ball position estimation, and coordinated trajectory (i.e. path and velocity) planning and tracking control. Simulations are performed to illustrate the feasibility of the realization of ball passing among three robots, implemented by a software program for coordinated trajectory planning and tracking control in the developed simulator.

This paper presents the control system of a chess-playing robot developed by the Research Institute of Robots at the Shanghai Jiaotong University. Thanks to the Windows NT operation system and the RTX (Real-Time eXtension), the whole system can achieve good real-time performance. The control system, which is supported by a standard PC hardware platform and a modularized structure of system software, is open-ended and easily expansible.