Advanced Robotics

Yamaguchi, Akihiko; Atkeson, Christopher G.

doi: 10.1080/01691864.2019.1632222pmid: N/A

This paper surveys recently published literature on tactile sensing in robotic manipulation to understand effective strategies for using tactile sensing and the issues involved in tactile sensing. It consists of a brief review of existing tactile sensors for robotic grippers and hands, review of modalities available from tactile sensing, review of the applications of tactile sensing in robotic manipulations, and discussion of the issues of tactile sensing and an approach to make tactile sensors more useful. We emphasize vision-based tactile sensing because of its potential to be a good tactile sensor for robots.

Okajima, Shotaro; Alnajjar, Fady S.; Costa, Álvaro; Asin-Prieto, Guillermo; Pons, Jose L.; Moreno, Juan C.; Hasegawa, Yasuhisa; Shimoda, Shingo

doi: 10.1080/01691864.2019.1633402pmid: N/A

Robot rehabilitation is now recognized as an important method for the efficient recovery. In European Project FP7 BioMot, we have discussed the potential of the robot rehabilitation and proposed the suitable process for it. In this paper, we describe the proposed rehabilitation process and create the theoretical basis for the robot rehabilitation through designing the control system and the patient model. To design the patient model, we describe the source of paralysis and motion controller separately and define the recovery function from the paralysis. In the theoretical analysis of the control system, we show that the robot motions are first adapted to the patient abnormal motions and gradually drive the patient motions to the better ones by the motion support. The singular perturbation analysis proves that the stabilities of the two different process, adaptation to the patient motions and the motion support to the better ones, as a slow motion subsystem and a fast motion subsystem, respectively. The simulation results show that the proposed control system can drive the patients to the better state depending on the patient conditions such as recovery speed and recovery potential. The proposed system can be tuned to fit to the variety of the real patient conditions when we apply it to the real applications.

Mizuno, Naoki; Ohno, Kazunori; Hamada, Ryunosuke; Kojima, Hiroyoshi; Fujita, Jun; Amano, Hisanori; Westfechtel, Thomas; Suzuki, Takahiro; Tadokoro, Satoshi

doi: 10.1080/01691864.2019.1632221pmid: N/A

The firefighting robot system (FFRS) comprises several autonomous robots that can be deployed to fire disasters in petrochemical complexes. For autonomous navigation, the path planner should consider the robot constraints and characteristics. Specifically, three requirements should be satisfied for a path to be suitable for the FFRS. First, the path must satisfy the maximum curvature constraint. Second, it must be smooth for robots to easily execute the trajectory. Third, it must allow reaching the target location in a specific heading. We propose a path planner that provides smooth paths, satisfy the maximum curvature constraint, and allows a suitable robot heading. The path smoother is based on the conjugate gradient descent, and three approaches are proposed for this path planner to meet all the FFRS requirements. The effectiveness of these approaches is qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated by examining the generated paths. Finally, the path planner is applied to an actual robot to verify the suitability of the generated paths for the FFRS, and planning is applied to another type of robot to demonstrate the wide applicability of the proposed planner.