2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

The use of piezoelectric materials as actuators or sensors is widespread, and numerous actuator topologies and models have been developed. However, many of these applications do not place stringent requirements on actuator mass or energy density. Motivated by applications that do have strict requirements in these areas such as flapping-wing microrobots, a torsional piezoelectric actuator is develo... View full abstract»

We present a learning-based approach for minimizing the electric energy consumption during walking of a passively-compliant bipedal robot. The energy consumption is reduced by learning a varying-height center-of-mass trajectory which uses efficiently the robot's passive compliance. To do this, we propose a reinforcement learning method which evolves the policy parameterization dynamically during t... View full abstract»

Task-space tracking control is essential for robot manipulation. In practice, task-space control of redundant robot systems is known to be susceptive to modeling errors. Here, data driven learning methods may present an interesting alternative approach. However, learning models for task-space tracking control from sampled data is an ill-posed problem. In particular, the same input data point can y... View full abstract»

Research on legged locomotion has encountered its limits in human-made actuation technology. Building a structure and an actuation system capable of performing like a biological muscle for the dynamic locomotion of a mid- to large-sized machine is prohibitive. Novel technologies are being explored with the aim of improving actuator performance. This paper describes the development of a robotic leg... View full abstract»

A large number of applications use motion capture systems to track the location and the body posture of people. For instance, the movie industry captures actors to animate virtual characters that perform stunts. Today's tracking systems either operate with statically mounted cameras and thus can be used in confined areas only or rely on inertial sensors that allow for free and large-scale motion b... View full abstract»

In the last years there has been an increasing interest in developing robots that are able to perform tasks cooperatively with humans instead of replacing them, for instance a robot which works as a guide in a museum. Until now the developed service guide robots only navigates through the aisles of the museums without concerning the people's movement. Then, the main purpose of the work presented i... View full abstract»

Complementary filtering (CF) is a well known method that can effectively fuse a gyroscope and accelerometer measurement in order to robustly estimate the attitude of a rigid body in a planar single degree of freedom (DOF) setting. The attitude can be estimated individually by either integrating the gyroscope measurement or by calculating the inverse tangent of the components of a 2-axis accelerome... View full abstract»

This paper presents the design and control of the sigma.7 haptic device and the new surgical console of the MiroSurge robotic system. The console and the haptic devices are designed with respect to requirements in minimally invasive robotic surgery. Dedicated left and right handed devices are integrated in an operator console in an ergonomic configuration. The height of the whole console is adjust... View full abstract»

This study proposes an asynchronous noninvasive Brain Computer Interface (BCI) -based navigation system for a humanoid robot, which can behave similarly to a human. In the experimental procedure, each subject is asked to undertake three different sessions: offline training, an online feedback test, and real-time control of a humanoid robot in an indoor maze. During the offline training session, am... View full abstract»

This paper builds up on the Capture Point concept and exploits the simple form of the dynamical equations of the Linear Inverted Pendulum model when formulated in terms of the center of mass and the Capture Point. The presented methods include (i) the derivation of a Capture Point (CP) control principle based on the natural dynamics of the linear inverted pendulum (LIP), which stabilizes the walki... View full abstract»

In this paper a decentralized controller-observer scheme for centroid tracking with a multi-robot system is presented. The key idea is to develop, for each robot, an observer of the collective system's state; each local observer is updated by only using information of the state of the robot and of its neighbors. The local observers' estimations are then used by the individual robots to cooperative... View full abstract»

This paper presents an enhanced sliding mode control for pneumatic master-slave teleoperation systems that are actuated by low-cost solenoid valves. A five-mode sliding control is incorporated into position-position, force-force, and force-position teleoperation architectures. While on/off valve pneumatic actuators have previously been modeled as having three discrete operating modes, an extension... View full abstract»

A current trend in robotics is to define robot tasks using a combination of superimposed motion patterns. For maximum versatility of such motion patterns, they should be easily and efficiently adaptable for situations beyond those for which the motion was originally designed. In this work, we show how a challenging minigolf-like task can be efficiently learned by the robot using a basic hitting mo... View full abstract»

In aging societies, there is a strong demand for robotics to tackle problems resulting from the aging population. We have developed a prototype nursing-care assistant robot, RIBA, which was designed to come in direct contact with patients and conduct physically challenging tasks. RIBA interacts with its object, typically a human, through multiple and distributed contact regions on its arms and bod... View full abstract»

This paper proposes a vision-based algorithm to autonomously track and chase a moving target with a small-size flying UAV. The challenging constraints associated with the UAV flight led us to consider a density-based representation of the object to track. The proposed approach to estimate the target's position, orientation and scale, is built on a robust color-based tracker using a multi-part repr... View full abstract»

One of the leading causes of automobile accidents is related to driving impairment due to drowsiness. A large percentage of these accidents occur due to drivers' unawareness of the degree of impairment. An automatic detection of drowsiness levels could lead to lower accidents and hence lower fatalities. However, the significant fluctuations of the drowsiness state within a short time poses a major... View full abstract»

High-rise tasks in agriculture, forestry and building industry requires robots possessing climbing function. Motivated by these potential applications and inspired by the climbing motion of animals such as inchworms, we have developed a novel biped climbing robot - Climbot. Built with a modular approach, the robot consists of five 1-DoF joint modules connected in series and two special grippers mo... View full abstract»

Abnormal behavior detection in periodic operations and high-frame-rate (HFR) video logging were realized by introducing a visual machinery surveillance algorithm, which includes a phase-encoding process for periodic operations to match input images with pre-stored reference images efficientl. Assuming that the periodic machinery operations to be monitored are perfectly regular, the surveillance al... View full abstract»

This paper proposes a design method of a static balancing mechanism using unit gravity compensators (e.g., 1-dof gravity compensator). In the design of a multi-dofs static balancing mechanism it is necessary to determine how many springs (or unit gravity compensators) are required and where they should be placed. This problem can be overcome by computing the mapping matrix between the joint space ... View full abstract»

We address the general object tracking with arbitrary shape using rangefinders, which is a key module for detecting surrounding traffic and infrastructure for an autonomous driving vehicle. An Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm with locally matching is proposed for motion estimation between two consecutive range images. The complexity of the algorithm is O(N) with N the numbers of scan points... View full abstract»

This paper presents the design and prototype of a camera-orienting mechanism. Bio-inspired actuators and mechanisms have been developed to pan and tilt a camera with comparable characteristics as a human eye. To meet the stringent space/weight requirement of mobile robotic applications, a compact camera-orienting mechanism is proposed. We specifically aim at matching the size of a human eye. Throu... View full abstract»

This paper describes linear load-sensitive continuously variable transmission with the spherical driving unit. This CVT mechanism consists of spherical drive, drive axis, motor housing, fixed bracket and linear sliding plate. It changes the reduction ratio continuously by inclination angle of active rotational axis. Additionally, this linear mechanism has a load-sensitive function by changing incl... View full abstract»

This paper presents a front-unit-following control method for a snake-like robot using screw drive mechanism. The operators are required to command only one unit in the head, then commands for the rest of the units are automatically calculated to track the path of the preceding units. The proposed method estimates the tracking error expressed in the Frenet frame using past velocity commands in ord... View full abstract»