This paper describes the ongoing development of a robotic assistant for microsurgery and other precise manipulation tasks. It reports a new and optimized version of a steady-hand manipulator for retinal surgery. The surgeon and the robot share control of a tool attached to the robot through a force sensor. The robot’s controller senses forces exerted by the operator on the tool and uses this in...

Self-organizing processes are crucial for the development of living beings. Practical applications in robots may benefit from the selforganization of behavior, e.g. for the increased fault tolerance and enhanced flexibility provided that external goals can also be achieved. We present several methods for the guidance of self-organizing control by externally prescribed criteria. We show that the...

In this paper, the dynamics and control of a novel mobile robot on the International Space Station (ISS) are discussed. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is developing a robotic system which has an extendable arm and several tethers to support Extravehicular Activity (EVA) performed by astronauts. The robotic arm is build from a light material and can be extended longer. The vibrati...

This paper presents the design, development and implementation of a Dynamic Fuzzy Neural Networks (D-FNNs) Controller suitable for real-time industrial applications. The unique feature of the D-FNNs controller is that it has dynamic self-organising structure, fast learning speed, good generalisation and flexibility in learning. The approach of rapid prototyping is employed to implement the D-FN...

A model-free robust control (MFRC) approach is proposed for position control of robot manipulators in the state space. The control approach is verified analytically to be robust subject to uncertainties including external disturbances, unmodeled dynamics, and parametric uncertainties. There is a high flexibility to work on different systems including actuators by the use of the proposed control...

In this paper, a fuzzy system for the control of the task of laying a fabric on a table via a robot is introduced. The task of laying is investigated and the parameters affecting the appropriate guiding of the fabric are identified to formulate the rule base for the fuzzy control system, which is tuned experimentally. The fuzzy control system formed is then verified by testing the laying of fab...

We present a navigation system using multiple sensors for unknown and dynamic indoor environments. To achieve the robustness and flexibility of the mobile robot, we develop a Behavior-Based system architecture, consisting of multi-layered behaviors using multiple sensors: ultrasonic sensors and a video camera. Basic behaviors required for navigation, such as, avoiding obstacles, moving towards ...

This paper addresses the issue of adaptive position/force control of uncertain constrained flexible joint robots (FJRs). The controller is developed without the assumptions of weak robot joint flexibility as adopted in popular singular perturbation (SP) approaches. It relies on the feedback of joint state variables and avoids noisy joint torque measurements found in most controllers developed s...

The interaction of humans and robots has the potential to set new grounds in industrial applications as well as in service robotics because it combines the strengths of humans, such as flexibility and adaptability, and the strengths of robots, such as power and precision. However, for a successful interaction the safety of the human has to be guaranteed at all times. This goal can be reached by...

This paper presents a state machine-based architecture, which enhances the flexibility and reusability of industrial robots, more concretely dual-arm multisensor robots. The proposed architecture, in addition to allowing absolute control of the execution, eases the programming of new applications by increasing the reusability of the developed modules. Through an easy-to-use graphical user inter...