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Robotics, Volume 9, Issue 3

2020 September - 26 articles

Cover Story: SVGS (Smartphone Video Guidance Sensor) is a vision-based embedded sensor, developed at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center using an Android-based smartphone, that enables proximity operations and formation flight in small satellite platforms. SVGS determines the relative position and orientation of a moving target relative to a coordinate system attached to the camera, by capturing an image of a set of illuminated points mounted on the target in a known geometric pattern. In the picture, SVGS is used as the real-time position and attitude sensor to control two RINGS (Resonant Inductive Near-field Generation Systems) ground units in a formation maneuver. Besides spacecraft guidance and control, SVGS can be used as a relative position and attitude sensor in a variety of robotic proximity operations such as docking, landing, and cooperative maneuvers. View this paper.
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Articles (26)

  • Article
  • Open Access
7 Citations
6,036 Views
20 Pages

18 September 2020

This paper presents an obstacle-avoidance trajectory tracking method based on a nonlinear model prediction, with a dynamic environment considered in the trajectory tracking of nonholonomic mobile robots for obstacle avoidance. In this method, collisi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
4,048 Views
15 Pages

Human Robot Hand Interaction with Plastic Deformation Control

  • Kenichi Murakami,
  • Koki Ishimoto,
  • Taku Senoo and
  • Masatoshi Ishikawa

16 September 2020

In recent years, force control has become more important due to the physical interaction of robots with humans and applications of robots to complex environments. Impedance control is widely used in force control; however, it cannot reproduce the beh...

(This article belongs to the Section Intelligent Robots and Mechatronics)
  • Article
  • Open Access
28 Citations
7,289 Views
16 Pages

Teachers’ Opinions towards Educational Robotics for Special Needs Students: An Exploratory Italian Study

  • Silvia Di Battista,
  • Monica Pivetti,
  • Michele Moro and
  • Emanuele Menegatti

16 September 2020

Research reveals that robotics can be a valuable tool for school students with special needs (SNs). However, to our knowledge, empirical studies on teachers’ attitudes towards educational robotics for SNs students have been very limited and, in...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances and Challenges in Educational Robotics)
  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
5,266 Views
29 Pages

FloorVLoc: A Modular Approach to Floorplan Monocular Localization

  • John Noonan,
  • Ehud Rivlin and
  • Hector Rotstein

10 September 2020

Intelligent vehicles for search and rescue, whose mission is assisting emergency personnel by visually exploring an unfamiliar building, require accurate localization. With GPS not available, and approaches relying on new infrastructure installation,...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers 2020)
  • Communication
  • Open Access
19 Citations
6,074 Views
19 Pages

10 September 2020

Today’s technological development inevitably defies educational approaches in terms of future demand for skills to be imparted. Among other skills, the capacity to operate and communicate effectively within multidisciplinary realms is duly cons...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances and Challenges in Educational Robotics)
  • Article
  • Open Access
7 Citations
4,469 Views
18 Pages

Proximity Operations and Three Degree-of-Freedom Maneuvers Using the Smartphone Video Guidance Sensor

  • Nasir Hariri,
  • Hector Gutierrez,
  • John Rakoczy,
  • Richard Howard and
  • Ivan Bertaska

10 September 2020

This paper presents the first demonstration of NASA’s Smartphone Video Guidance Sensor (SVGS) as real-time position and attitude estimator for proximity and formation maneuvers. An optimal linear quadratic Gaussian controller was used, combinin...

(This article belongs to the Section Aerospace Robotics and Autonomous Systems)
  • Article
  • Open Access
16 Citations
6,160 Views
17 Pages

31 August 2020

Accurate kinematic models are essential for effective control of surgical robots. For tendon driven robots, which are common for minimally invasive surgery, the high nonlinearities in the transmission make modelling complex. Machine learning techniqu...

(This article belongs to the Section AI in Robotics)
  • Article
  • Open Access
5 Citations
5,618 Views
23 Pages

28 August 2020

The thumb assists other fingers, and any damage in its functionality prevents the human hand from performing dexterous functions. In this paper, the kinematic design of the (2–RRU)–URR parallel mechanism as the application of the thumb re...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Theory and Practice on Robotics and Mechatronics)
  • Article
  • Open Access
87 Citations
14,806 Views
20 Pages

Integrity Analysis for GPS-Based Navigation of UAVs in Urban Environment

  • Oguz Kagan Isik,
  • Juhyeon Hong,
  • Ivan Petrunin and
  • Antonios Tsourdos

25 August 2020

The increasing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in safety-critical missions in both civilian and military areas demands accurate and reliable navigation, where one of the key sources of navigation information is presented by Global Navigation S...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Navigation and Control of UAVs)
  • Article
  • Open Access
22 Citations
10,045 Views
13 Pages

24 August 2020

3D printing is a widely used technology that has been recently applied in construction to reduce construction time significantly. A large 3D printer often uses a traditional Cartesian robot with inherent problems, such as position errors and printing...

  • Article
  • Open Access
13 Citations
8,511 Views
19 Pages

Classifying Intelligence in Machines: A Taxonomy of Intelligent Control

  • Callum Wilson,
  • Francesco Marchetti,
  • Marilena Di Carlo,
  • Annalisa Riccardi and
  • Edmondo Minisci

21 August 2020

The quest to create machines that can solve problems as humans do leads us to intelligent control. This field encompasses control systems that can adapt to changes and learn to improve their actions—traits typically associated with human intell...

(This article belongs to the Section Industrial Robots and Automation)
  • Article
  • Open Access
24 Citations
8,810 Views
16 Pages

18 August 2020

Accurate object classification and position estimation is a crucial part of executing autonomous pick-and-place operations by a robot and can be realized using RGB-D sensors becoming increasingly available for use in industrial applications. In this...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Robotics and AI)
  • Article
  • Open Access
21 Citations
6,949 Views
16 Pages

This paper deals with a special architecture of Spherical Parallel Manipulators (SPMs) designed to be a haptic device for a medical tele-operation system. This architecture is obtained by replacing the kinematic of one leg of a classical 3-RRR SPM (R...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Theory and Practice on Robotics and Mechatronics)
  • Article
  • Open Access
4 Citations
5,115 Views
15 Pages

Translational parallel manipulators (TPMs) with DELTA-like architectures are the most known and affirmed ones, even though many other TPM architectures have been proposed and studied in the literature. In a recent patent application, this author has...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Kinematics and Robot Design III, KaRD2020)
  • Article
  • Open Access
30 Citations
8,468 Views
24 Pages

This paper presents a novel inverse kinematics global method for a redundant robot manipulator performing a tracking maneuver. The proposed method, based on the choice of appropriate initial joint trajectories that satisfy the kinematic constraints t...

  • Article
  • Open Access
7 Citations
7,109 Views
15 Pages

Adaptive Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Control of a Three Degree-of-Freedom Helicopter

  • Hicham Chaoui,
  • Sumit Yadav,
  • Rosita Sharif Ahmadi and
  • Allal El Moubarek Bouzid

This paper combines interval type-2 fuzzy logic with adaptive control theory for the control of a three degree-of-freedom (DOF) helicopter. This strategy yields robustness to various kinds of uncertainties and guaranteed stability of the closed-loop...

(This article belongs to the Section Industrial Robots and Automation)
  • Article
  • Open Access
25 Citations
7,852 Views
14 Pages

Robotic Detection and Grasp of Maize and Sorghum: Stem Measurement with Contact

  • Abbas Atefi,
  • Yufeng Ge,
  • Santosh Pitla and
  • James Schnable

Frequent measurements of the plant phenotypes make it possible to monitor plant status during the growing season. Stem diameter is an important proxy for overall plant biomass and health. However, the manual measurement of stem diameter in plants is...

(This article belongs to the Section Agricultural and Field Robotics)
  • Communication
  • Open Access
7 Citations
12,258 Views
11 Pages

The article presents a viewpoint on the current status and limitations of humanoid robotics and possible future progress. It may be seen as a continuation of the article “How far away is artificial man?” published in 2001 by a group of au...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers 2020)
  • Article
  • Open Access
17 Citations
15,644 Views
16 Pages

Comparison of Three Off-the-Shelf Visual Odometry Systems

  • Alexandre Alapetite,
  • Zhongyu Wang,
  • John Paulin Hansen,
  • Marcin Zajączkowski and
  • Mikołaj Patalan

Positioning is an essential aspect of robot navigation, and visual odometry an important technique for continuous updating the internal information about robot position, especially indoors without GPS (Global Positioning System). Visual odometry is u...

(This article belongs to the Section Sensors and Control in Robotics)
  • Review
  • Open Access
83 Citations
16,054 Views
19 Pages

Possible Life Saver: A Review on Human Fall Detection Technology

  • Zhuo Wang,
  • Vignesh Ramamoorthy,
  • Udi Gal and
  • Allon Guez

Among humans, falls are a serious health problem causing severe injuries and even death for the elderly population. Besides, falls are also a major safety threat to bikers, skiers, construction workers, and others. Fortunately, with the advancements...

(This article belongs to the Section Medical Robotics and Service Robotics)
  • Article
  • Open Access
4 Citations
4,858 Views
18 Pages

Task allocation for specialized unmanned robotic agents is addressed in this paper. Based on the assumptions that each individual robotic agent possesses specialized capabilities and that targets representing the tasks to be performed in the surround...

(This article belongs to the Section Industrial Robots and Automation)
  • Article
  • Open Access
5 Citations
9,482 Views
14 Pages

The proposed study is focused on the development of a novel modification of the slider-crank mechanism, the kinematic scheme of which is organized by coupling planar and spatial (screw) kinematic chains. The structure of this mechanism provides the e...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Theory and Practice on Robotics and Mechatronics)
  • Article
  • Open Access
96 Citations
14,176 Views
14 Pages

The modeling of soft structures, actuators, and sensors is challenging, primarily due to the high nonlinearities involved in such soft robotic systems. Finite element modeling (FEM) is an effective technique to represent soft and deformable robotic s...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers 2020)
  • Article
  • Open Access
47 Citations
15,825 Views
46 Pages

Least Squares Optimization: From Theory to Practice

  • Giorgio Grisetti,
  • Tiziano Guadagnino,
  • Irvin Aloise,
  • Mirco Colosi,
  • Bartolomeo Della Corte and
  • Dominik Schlegel

Nowadays, Nonlinear Least-Squares embodies the foundation of many Robotics and Computer Vision systems. The research community deeply investigated this topic in the last few years, and this resulted in the development of several open-source solvers t...

(This article belongs to the Section Industrial Robots and Automation)
  • Article
  • Open Access
12 Citations
7,718 Views
22 Pages

Kineto-Elasto-Static Design of Underactuated Chopstick-Type Gripper Mechanism for Meal-Assistance Robot

  • Tomohiro Oka,
  • Jorge Solis,
  • Ann-Louise Lindborg,
  • Daisuke Matsuura,
  • Yusuke Sugahara and
  • Yukio Takeda

Our research aims at developing a meal-assistance robot with vision system and multi-gripper that enables frail elderly to live more independently. This paper presents a development of a chopstick-type gripper for a meal-assistance robot, which is ca...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Kinematics and Robot Design III, KaRD2020)
  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
5,637 Views
24 Pages

Model-Free Optimized Tracking Control Heuristic

  • Ning Wang,
  • Mohammed Abouheaf,
  • Wail Gueaieb and
  • Nabil Nahas

Many tracking control solutions proposed in the literature rely on various forms of tracking error signals at the expense of possibly overlooking other dynamic criteria, such as optimizing the control effort, overshoot, and settling time, for example...

(This article belongs to the Section AI in Robotics)
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Robotics - ISSN 2218-6581