The advent of metamaterials more than 15 years ago has offered extraordinary new ways of manipulating electromagnetic waves. Yet, progress in this field has been unequal across the electromagnetic spectrum, especially when it comes to finding applications for such artificial media. Optical metamaterials, in particular, are less compatible with active functionalities than their counterparts deve...

A robotic manipulator can fail in many diierent ways, and its capabilities after a failure are a major concern, especially for manipulators used in hazardous and remote environments, where the cost of repair or replacement is high. This article presents a study of the workspaces of robotic arms after a free-swinging failure, deened as a hardware or software failure that prevents the application...

In recent years, minimally-invasive surgical systems based on flexible robotic manipulators have met with success. One major advantage of the flexible manipulator approach is its superior safety characteristics as compared to rigid manipulators. However, their soft compliant structure, in combination with internal friction, results in poor position and force regulation which have limited their ...

Employing disturbance observers is an effective way of enhancing the stability and performance of the control systems subject to disturbances. Disturbance observers have been extensively used for control of mechatronic systems since their introduction in the 1980s. This thesis studies the design of nonlinear disturbance observers for robotic manipulators and their applications in the control of...

This article analyzes the evolution and current trends in aerial robotic manipulation, comprising helicopters, conventional underactuated multirotors, multidirectional thrust platforms equipped with a wide variety of manipulators capable physically interacting environment. It also covers cooperative manipulation interconnected actuated multibody designs. The review is completed developments tel...

Faults in robotic manipulators can cause economic losses and serious damages. In this paper, two artificial neural networks are employed to provide FDI to robotic manipulators. The first is a multilayer perceptron trained with backpropagation utilized to reproduce the dynamic of the manipulator and, so, generate the residual vector. The second is a radial basis function network employed to clas...

A new method of handling the kinematic singularities of serial robotic manipulators is proposed. The idea is to transform the manipulator’s workspace W into a desingularized workspace W . Robotic motions can then be planned anywhere inW , subject to limits on spatial velocity and acceleration, and the resulting joint velocities and accelerations will be well-behaved and bounded. W differs from ...

Improving robotic manipulation is critical for robots to be actively useful in real-world factories and homes. While some success has been shown in simulation and controlled environments, robots are slow, clumsy, and not general or robust enough when interacting with their environment. By contrast, humans effortlessly manipulate objects. One possible reason for this discrepancy is that humans h...