# IEEE Transactions on Robotics

### Early Access Articles

Early Access articles are made available in advance of the final electronic or print versions. Early Access articles are peer reviewed but may not be fully edited. They are fully citable from the moment they appear in IEEE Xplore.

## Filter Results

Displaying Results 1 - 19 of 19
• ### Positive–Negative Stiffness Actuators

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 12
| | PDF (1367 KB)

Compliant actuators are typically designed to possess a tunable positive stiffness characteristic in order to generate restoring force upon displacement. These actuators either require two independent motor units or closed-loop control to change both their equilibrium position and output stiffness. The introduction of negative stiffness, in combination with tunable positive stiffness, may reduce t... View full abstract»

• ### Real-Time Robotic Manipulation of Cylindrical Objects in Dynamic Scenarios Through Elliptic Shape Primitives

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 19
| | PDF (12537 KB)

Robotic manipulation employs the object detection in images to create a scene awareness and locate an object's pose. In dynamic scenarios, fast multiobject detection and tracking are crucial. Many objects commonly found in household and industrial environments are represented by cylindrical shapes. Thus, it is available for robots to manipulate them through the real-time detection of elliptic shap... View full abstract»

• ### Generalized Ray-Based Lattice Generation and Graph Representation of Wrench-Closure Workspace for Arbitrary Cable-Driven Robots

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 15
| | PDF (1521 KB)

This paper presents a new generalized ray-based approach to the generation and representation of the wrench-closure workspace (WCW) for cable-driven robots (CDRs). Existing WCW studies have yet to address two significant problems, first is the lack of a generalized approach to generate the WCW with continuity information for all degrees-of-freedom (DoFs) and arbitrary CDRs, and second is a workspa... View full abstract»

• ### Localization in Densely Packed Swarms Using Interrobot Collisions as a Sensing Modality

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 14
| | PDF (1526 KB)

As the size of robots decreases in multirobot systems, collisions cease to be catastrophic events that need to be avoided at all costs. This implies that less conservative, coordinated control strategies can be employed, where collisions are not only tolerated, but can potentially be harnessed as an information source. In this paper, we follow this line of inquiry by employing collisions as a sens... View full abstract»

• ### Clock-Torqued Rolling SLIP Model and Its Application to Variable-Speed Running in a Hexapod Robot

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 9
| | PDF (4587 KB) |  Media

In this paper, we report on the development of the clock-torqued rolling spring loaded inverted pendulum (CTR-SLIP) model. The new model, which adds clock-based torque control on the leg orientation of the previously developed R-SLIP model, has two advantages: first, regulating the model to follow its passive dynamic running (i.e., at a fixed point) significantly increases the model's basin of att... View full abstract»

• ### Customizable Three-Dimensional-Printed Origami Soft Robotic Joint With Effective Behavior Shaping for Safe Interactions

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 10
| | PDF (4290 KB)

Fast-growing interests in safe and effective robot–environment interactions stimulated global investigations on soft robotics. The inherent compliance of soft robots ensures promising safety features but drastically reduces force capability, thereby complicating system modeling and control. To tackle these limitations, a soft robotic joint with enhanced strength, servo performance, and impact beha... View full abstract»

• ### Predictive Inverse Kinematics for Redundant Manipulators With Task Scaling and Kinematic Constraints

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 8
| | PDF (994 KB)

The paper presents a fast online predictive method to solve the task-priority differential inverse kinematics of redundant manipulators under kinematic constraints. It implements a task-scaling technique to preserve the desired geometrical task, when the trajectory is infeasible for the robot capabilities. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology. View full abstract»

• ### Safe Testing of Electrical Diathermy Cutting Using a New Generation Soft Manipulator

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 8
| | PDF (2318 KB) |  Media

The first demonstration of a pneumatic soft continuum robot is integrated in series with a rigid robot arm, safely performing teleoperated diathermic tissue-cutting. The rigid arm autonomously maintains a safe tool contact force, while the soft arm manually follows the desired cutting path. Ex-vivo experimentation demonstrates submillimetric deviations from target paths. View full abstract»

• ### Robust Planar Odometry Based on Symmetric Range Flow and Multiscan Alignment

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 13
| | PDF (6015 KB)

This paper presents a dense method for estimating planar motion with a laser scanner. Starting from a symmetric representation of geometric consistency between scans, we derive a precise range flow constraint and express the motion of the scan observations as a function of the rigid motion of the scanner. In contrast to existing techniques, which align the incoming scan with either the previous on... View full abstract»

• ### Modeling and Implementation of the McKibben Actuator in Hydraulic Systems

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 10
| | PDF (1992 KB)

McKibben actuators, comprised of an elastomeric tube wrapped in inextensible fibers, were developed in the 1950s and have been used primarily in pneumatic applications. Mc-Kibben actuators provide superior force and power density at a lower cost compared to many conventional actuators due to their simple design. This paper explores driving McKibben actuators with high-pressure hydraulics and refle... View full abstract»

• ### Fast, Generic, and Reliable Control and Simulation of Soft Robots Using Model Order Reduction

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 12
| | PDF (6095 KB) |  Media

Obtaining an accurate mechanical model of a soft deformable robot compatible with the computation time imposed by robotic applications is often considered an unattainable goal. This paper should invert this idea. The proposed methodology offers the possibility to dramatically reduce the size and the online computation time of a finite element model (FEM) of a soft robot. After a set of expensive o... View full abstract»

• ### Multimodal Sensorimotor Integration for Expert-in-the-Loop Telerobotic Surgical Training

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 16
| | PDF (4738 KB)

This paper presents a novel multimodal training platform integrated with hand-over-hand (HOH) haptic guidance for dual-console surgical robotic systems such as the da Vinci Si system. The expert-in-the-loop (EIL) framework incorporates a fuzzy interface system in order to provide a trainee with adaptive authority over the procedure as well as hand-over-hand haptic guidance adjusted in real time ba... View full abstract»

• ### On the Combined Inverse-Dynamics/Passivity-Based Control of Elastic-Joint Robots

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 11
| | PDF (2094 KB) |  Media

In this paper, we present a novel global tracking control approach for elastic-joint robots that can be efficiently computed and is robust against model uncertainties and input disturbances. Elastic-joint robots provide enhanced safety and resiliency for interaction with the environment and humans. On the other hand, the joint elasticity complicates the motion-control problem especially when robus... View full abstract»

• ### Control of Magnetic Microrobot Teams for Temporal Micromanipulation Tasks

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 18
| | PDF (8001 KB) |  Media

In this paper, we present a control framework that allows magnetic microrobot teams to accomplish complex micromanipulation tasks captured by global linear temporal logic (LTL) formulas. To address this problem, we propose an optimal control synthesis method that constructs discrete plans for the robots that satisfy both the assigned tasks as well as proximity constraints between the robots due to... View full abstract»

• ### On the Covariance of$\bm X$in$\bm A\bm X = \bm X\bm B$

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 8
| | PDF (732 KB)

Hand–eye calibration, which consists in identifying the rigid-body transformation between a camera mounted on the robot end-effector and the end-effector itself, is a fundamental problem in robot vision. Mathematically, this problem can be formulated as: solve for$\bm {X}$in$\bm {A}\bm {X}= \bm {X}\bm {B}$. In this paper, we provide a rig... View full abstract»

• ### Anonymous Hedonic Game for Task Allocation in a Large-Scale Multiple Agent System

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 15
| | PDF (2012 KB)

This paper proposes a novel game-theoretical autonomous decision-making framework to address a task allocation problem for a swarm of multiple agents. We consider cooperation of self-interested agents, and show that our proposed decentralized algorithm guarantees convergence of agents with social inhibition to a Nash stable partition (i.e., social agreement) within polynomial time. The algorithm i... View full abstract»

• ### Accelerated Sensorimotor Learning of Compliant Movement Primitives

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 7
| | PDF (976 KB) |  Media

Autonomous trajectory generation through generalization requires a database of motion, which can be difficult and time consuming to obtain. In this paper, we propose a method for autonomous expansion of a database for the generation of compliant and accurate motion, achieved through the framework of compliant movement primitives (CMPs). These combine task-specific kinematic and corresponding feed-... View full abstract»

• ### A Path/Surface Following Control Approach to Generate Virtual Fixtures

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 16
| | PDF (2974 KB)

The workspace of a robot can be restricted by virtual fixtures to assist an operator in physical human–robot interaction tasks. This paper introduces a combination of surface following control (SFC) with compliance control and presents a path/SFC approach to systematically generate virtual fixtures. This approach allows implementation of numerous types of constraints like guidance and forbidden re... View full abstract»

• ### Continuous-Time Visual-Inertial Odometry for Event Cameras

Publication Year: 2018, Page(s):1 - 16
| | PDF (7005 KB)

Event cameras are bioinspired vision sensors that output pixel-level brightness changes instead of standard intensity frames. They offer significant advantages over standard cameras, namely a very high dynamic range, no motion blur, and a latency in the order of microseconds. However, due to the fundamentally different structure of the sensor’s output, new algorithms that exploit the high temporal... View full abstract»

## Aims & Scope

IEEE Transactions on Robotics covers both theory and applications on topics including: kinematics, dynamics, control, and simulation of robots and intelligent machines and systems.

Full Aims & Scope

## Meet Our Editors

Editor-in-Chief

Kevin Lynch
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL, USA
ieee-tro@northwestern.edu