An omnidirectional mobile robot is able, kinematically, to move in any direction regardless of current pose. To date, nearly all designs and analyses of omnidirectional mobile robots have considered the case of motion on flat, smooth terrain. In this paper, an investigation of the design and analysis of an omnidirectional mobile robot for use in rough terrain is presented. Kinematic and geometr...

Today, industrialized countries are facing a major problem, the lack of skilled engineers. Despite the increasing demand for engineers in the labor market, the number of students going to engineering courses has been declining. This paper reports some initiatives carried out by the industrial robotics laboratory of the University of Coimbra (Portugal) which can contribute to help the youths to ...

A method is described for the inverse calibration of a manipulator or robot. Inverse calibration is defined to be finding the joint angles necessary to drive a robot to a desired endpoint location. The joint angles recommended by the robot controller's internal model will not, in general, drive the robot to the desired location because of inaccuracies in this model. Inverse calibration seeks to...

Teleoperated robots for minimally invasive surgery make surgeons loose direct contact with the patient. We are developing a handheld, dexterous surgical robot that can be controlled with one hand only, while standing at the operating table. The instrument is composed of a master part (the handle) and a slave part (the tip). This work compares the performance of different control modes, i.e. dif...

We investigate energy-optimal control of robots with ultracapacitor based regenerative drive systems. Based on a previously introduced framework, a fairly generic model is considered for the robot and the drive system. An optimal control problem is formulated to find point-to point trajectories maximizing the amount of energy regenerated and stored in the capacitor. The optimization problem, it...

The paper presents the principles of the decoupling control of the phase voltage in the Switched Reluctance motor drive for the direct-drive joint of the robot. The motor drive system elements, such as the structure of the three-phase 6/10 structure Switched Reluctance motor and the rotor position, the main circuit topology of the three-phase bifilar winding power converter and the pulse width ...

We have built Tippy, a micro telepresence robot that allows a user to remotely project him or herself into another space, move around, and communicate via video and audio. An iPod Touch running Skype provides the robot with wireless video input and output capabilities and handles the movement commands from the remote user. In order to handle the robot’s movement without implementing an addition...

MechaRoach II is a hexapod robot under development that will walk on horizontal surfaces, climb on inclined or vertical mesh surfaces, and test strategies for transitioning between the two. The locomotion principles that allow cockroaches to make these transitions have been studied and mechanisms using abstractions of those principles have been developed for the robot. These principles include ...

Robots are faced with increasingly complex, hard to simulate environments. Multilegged robots exhibit dynamics that are often difficult to model well. Their development thus depends on experimental verification. Here we propose “focused modularity” – an approach combining benefits of both modular robotics and more traditional rapid fabrication. We made robot mechanisms by laser cutting low-cost...

The key to effective autonomous mobile robot navigation is accurate self-localization. Without self-localization or with inaccurate self-localization, any non-holonomic autonomous mobile robot is blind in a navigation environment. The KCLBOT [1] is a nonholonomic two wheeled mobile robot that is built around the specifications for ‘Micromouse Robot’ and the ‘RoboCup’ competition. These specific...