Grasping is one of the most important abilities needed for future service robots. In the task of picking up an object from between clutter, traditional robotics approaches would determine a suitable grasping point and then use a movement planner to reach the goal. The planner would require precise and accurate information about the environment and long computation times, both of which are often...

This paper demonstrates the iTaSC approach to a force-sensorless and bimanual human-robot comanipulation task on a tree-structured robot, comprising (i) co-manipulation of an object with a person, (ii) dynamic and static obstacle avoidance with its base, (iii) maintaining visual contact with the operator, and (iv) unnatural pose prevention. The task is implemented in a structured way in a reusa...

Existing maritime navigation and reconnaissance systems require man-in-the-loop situation awareness for obstacle avoidance, area survey analysis, threat assessment, and mission re-planning. We have developed a boat with fully autonomous navigation, surveillance, and reactive behaviors. Autonomous water navigation is achieved with no prior maps or other data – the water surface, riverbanks obsta...

The work of a simulated neuroendocrine controller with ultrastable neurons and glands is sketched and tested in terms of stability and adaptability. The artificial neurons connect to each other and to motors, while hormones produced by behaviour-related glands regulate their output. The ultrastable nature of the cells allows them to maintain their homeostasis by random reconfiguration of their ...

After a quarter century of mobile robot research, applications of this fascinating technology appear in real-world settings. Some require operation in environments that are densely cluttered with moving obstacles. Public mass exhibitions or conventions are examples of such challenging environments. This dissertation addresses the navigational challenges that arise in settings where mobile robot...

In this paper, we develop an algorithm for avoidance of earth obstacles using model-reference impedance control for autonomous excavator. There have been many research in the past regarding autonomous excavation, which were only concerned about position control, force control and path generation. However in order to apply the control system or algorithm to the actual autonomous excavation, it i...

Time to Contact (TTC) is a biologically inspired method for obstacle detection and reactive control of motion that does not require scene reconstruction or 3D depth estimation. TTC is a measure of distance expressed in time units. Our results show that TTC can be used to provide reactive obstacle avoidance for local navigation. In this paper we describe the principles of time to contact and sho...

A novel collision cone approach is proposed as an aid to collision detection and avoidance between irregularly shaped moving objects with unknown trajectories. It is shown that the collision cone can be effectively used to determine whether collision between a robot and an obstacle (both moving in a dynamic environment) is imminent. No restrictions are placed on the shapes of either the robot o...

Navigation is a central issue in the area of autonomous agents and the dynamic nature of the real world environments requires fast path planning methods for successful operation of the agent in them. We present a dynamic path planning and obstacle avoidance scheme based on a Hopfield neural network. The external input (sensory input) provides information to the system about the position of the ...

The dynamic window approach is a well known navigation scheme developed in Fox et al. (1997) and extended in Brock and Khatib (1999). It is safe by construction and has been shown to perform very efficiently in experimental setups. However, one can construct examples where the proposed scheme fails to attain the goal configuration. What has been lacking is a theoretical treatment of the algorit...