Motion Planning with Uncertain Information in Robotic Tasks

We describe a new tactile sensor for use in dexterous manipulation and telemanipulation. The sensor consists of an array of curvature-measuring elements embedded in a compliant membrane. The resulting sensor is inexpensive and robust, and can be used in robotic hands with soft fingertips for object handling and exploration. The curvature measurements provide information for manipulation plannin...

This paper describes a control scheme combining a mobile platform which is commanded at the velocity level with a position controlled robot arm. Based on separate controllers for both subsystems a method for force guidance is proposed which provides control of the tool location and of the posture of the mobile platform. Only a single force/torque sensor is used for this purpose. Also the slower...

This paper represents a practical and economical alternative to manual deburring. Several passive end-effectors have been designed, built and tested to meet the robotic deburring requirements. The compliancy in these end-effectors allow for robot position uncertainties relative to the parts. A set of experiments have been carried out to show the effectiveness of the end-effectors performance in...

Human behavior is complex, but structured along individual and social lines. Robotic systems interacting with people in uncontrolled environments need capabilities to correctly interpret, predict and respond to human behaviors. This paper discusses the scientific, technological and application challenges that arise from the mutual interaction of robotics and computational human behavior underst...

A rover design study was undertaken for exploration of the Moon. Rovers that have been launched in the past carried a suite of science payload either onboard its body or on the robotic arm’s end. No rover has so far been launched and tasked with “carrying and deploying” a payload on an extraterrestrial surface. This paper describes a lunar rover designed for deploying payload as well as carryin...

This article reports on an explorative investigation comparing the notions of future human-robot relationships of the participants of a user study who interacted with a humanoid robot for the first time on the one hand, and those of experts from the industry on the other hand. By means of in-depth interviews, data on the following topics was gathered from 52 user study participants and six expe...

We analyze the stability of our novel 2-way fuzzy adaptive controller using describing function technique. We use additivity property of fuzzy systems to develop a systematic analytical approach for the design of a multi-input singleoutput fuzzy controller that we use for the control of a flexible-joint robot arm. Copyright c ©2005 IFAC

This paper presents a novel geometric approach for learning and reproducing trajectory-based skills from human demonstrations. Our approach models a skill as a Generalized Cylinder, a geometric representation composed of an arbitrary space curve called spine and a smoothly varying cross-section. While this model has been utilized to solve other robotics problems, this is the first application o...