Biped walking by using all joint movements and DOFs in both directions (sagittal plane and coronal plane) is one of the most complicated research topics in robotics. In this paper, angular trajectories of a stable biped walking for a humanoid robot are generated by a Truncated Fourier Series (TFS) approach. The movements of legs and arms in sagittal plane are implemented by an optimized gait ge...

The fast growing interest in flexible, versatile and mobile robotic manipulators demands for robots with inherent high passive safety suited for direct human-robot interaction. To gain access to these new applications in the field of automation engineering where close vicinity and direct cooperating with humans are required, the “BioRob” project demonstrates the applicability of a new biologica...

Aiming at the hand rehabilitation of stroke patients, a wearable hand exoskeleton with circuitous joint is proposed. The circuitous joint adopts the symmetric pinion and rack mechanism (SPRM) with the parallel mechanism. The exoskeleton finger is a serial mechanism composed of three closed-chain SPRM joints in series. The kinematic equations of the open chain of the finger and the closed chains...

Serpentine robots are slender, multi-segmented vehicles designed to provide greater mobility than conventional mobile robots. Serpentine robots are ideally suited for urban search and rescue, military intelligence gathering, and for inspection tasks in hazardous or inaccessible environments. One such serpentine robot, developed at the University of Michigan, is the “OmniTread OT-4.” The OT-4 co...

Serpentine robots are slender, multisegmented vehicles designed to provide greater mobility than conventional wheeled or tracked robots. Serpentine robots are thus ideally suited for urban search and rescue as well as for surveillance and inspection tasks in hazardous and hard-to-reach environments. One such serpentine robot, currently under development at the University of Michigan, is the “Om...

This paper introduces a systematic constraint-based approach to specify complex tasks of general sensorbased robot systems consisting of rigid links and joints. The approach integrates both instantaneous task specification and estimation of geometric uncertainty in a unified framework. Major components are the use of feature coordinates, defined with respect to object and feature frames, which ...

The workspace of a Robot is determined by an analytical method. The method is applicable to kinematic chains that can be modeled using the Denavit-Hartenberg representation for serial kinematic chains. This method is based upon analytical criteria for determining singular behavior of the mechanism. By manipulating the Jacobian of the robot by the row rank deficiency condition, the singularities...

The paper presents a new torque-controlled lightweight robot for medical procedures developed at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics of the German Aerospace Center. Based on the experiences in lightweight robotics and anthropomorphic robotic hands, a small robot arm with 7 axis and torque-controlled joints tailored to surgical procedures has been designed. With an optimized anthropomorph...

To improve the operation and the flexibility of the robot hand, in this paper we presented a new type pneumatic flexible robot hand based on the pneumatic artificial muscles and active flexible bending joints which developed in the previous research. The robot hand is imposed of five three-joint fingers; the middle finger is on the datum axis with the other four fingers orthogonal and symmetric...

This paper presents the design of our new 33 degree of freedom full size humanoid robot, SAFFiR (Shipboard Autonomous Fire Fighting Robot). The goal of this research project is to realize a high performance mixed force and position controlled robot with parallel actuation. The robot has two 6 DOF legs and arms, a waist, neck, and 3 DOF hands/fingers. The design is characterized by a central lig...