Complex systems and complex missions take years of planning and force launches to become incredibly expensive. The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the more catastrophic if it fails. The solution has always been to plan better, add redundancy, test thoroughly and use high quality components. Based on our experience in building ground based mobile robots (legged and wheele...

This paper presents the use of a hybrid collaborative stereo vision system (3D-distributed visual sensing using different kind of vision cameras) for the autonomous navigation of a wheeled robot team. It is proposed a triangulation-based method for the 3D-posture computation of an unknown object by considering the collaborative hybrid stereo vision system, and this way to steer the robots team ...

Today’s trends in control engineering and robotics are blending gradually into a slightly challenging area, the development of fault tolerant real-time applications. Hence, applications should timely deliver synchronized data-sets, minimize latency in their response and meet their performance specifications in the presence of disturbances and faults. The fault tolerant behavior in mobile robots...

Articulated Wheeled Robot (AWR) locomotion systems consist of a chassis connected to sets of wheels through articulated linkages. Such articulated ”legwheel systems” facilitate reconfigurability that has significant applications in many arenas, but also engender constraints that make the design, analysis and control difficult. In this paper we study this class of systems in the context of desig...

The preservation of connectivity in mobile robot networks is critical to the success of most existing algorithms designed to achieve various goals. The most basic method to achieve this involves each agent preserving its edges for all time. More advanced methods preserve a (minimum) spanning tree in the network. Other methods are based on increasing the algebraic graph connectivity, which is gi...

3D DYNAMIC MODELING OF A SPHERICAL WHEELED SELF-BALANCING MOBILE ROBOT Ali Nail İNAL M.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ömer MORGÜL August 2012 In recent years, dynamically stable platforms that move on spherical wheels, also known as BallBots, gained popularity in the robotics literature as an alternative locomotion method to statically stable wheeled mobile r...

This paper introduces the basis of a graphical software application, designed for low cost hardware, as a general, flexible and open platform to work on robotics. VirtualRobot has proven to be a useful tool in many fields of robotics, such as manipulator programming, mobile robots control (wheeled, sub-aquatic and walking robots), distance computation, sensor simulation, collision detection, mo...

The paper discusses the functional design and the embodiment design of Epi.q Lizard, which is the last version of the Epi.q ground mobile robots family. Epi.q robots are equipped with underactuated stepping triple wheel locomotion units with epicyclical gearings, capable of switching between wheeled and legged locomotion without control intervention, depending on the dynamic condition of the ve...