Robotics, Volume 9, Issue 3

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...