The high complexity of the mechanical system and the difficult task of walking itself makes the task of designing the control for legged robots a diffcult one. Even if the implementation of parts of the desired functionality, like posture control or basic swing/stance movement, can be solved by the usage of classical engeneering approaches, the control of the overall system tends to be very unf...

Conventional golf-swing robots are generally used to evaluate the performance of golf clubs and balls. Most of the robots have two or three joints with completely interrelated motion. This interrelation only allows the user of the robot to specify the initial posture and swing velocity, and therefore the subtle adjustments in swing motion that advanced golfers make according to the characterist...

We propose a novel switching control law for the posture stabilization of a wheeled mobile robot, that utilizes the (energetic) passivity of the system's open-loop dynamics with non-negligible inertial effects. The proposed passivity-based switching control law ensures that the robot's (x, y)-position enters into an arbitrarily small (as speci ed by user-designed error-bound) level set of a cer...

During transportation by ambulance, the inertial acceleration acts on a patient when an ambulance decelerates or turns a corner. Such acceleration often gives a supine patient physical stress such as blood pressure variation and body sway, which results in pain or a feeling of discomfort. To reduce this undesirable effect of the acceleration, the actively-controlled bed, which controls a postur...

BACKGROUND Coping with diabetes control is difficult for newly diagnosed and experienced patients alike. Children with diabetes face severe challenges, as they may not yet have attained the necessary cognitive, fine motor or psychosocial skills required for performance of the tasks required from the diabetic patient. Most therefore require some adult assistance. OBJECTIVES To establish whethe...

Autonomous adaptive locomotion over irregular terrain is one important topic in robotics research. Postural control, meaning movement generation for robot legs in order to attain balance, is a first step in this direction. In this article, we focus on the essential issue of modeling the interaction between the central nervous system and the peripheral information in the locomotion context. This...

A new approach to real-time collision avoidance for dexterous 7-DOF arms and supportive simulation and expem”mentai results are presented. The collision avoidance problem is formulated and solved as a force control problem. Virtual forces opposing intrusion of the arm into the obstacle safety zone are computed in real time. These forces are then nullified bg employing an outer feedback loop whi...

The paper considers a specific class of wheeled mobile robots referred to as mobile wheeled pendulums (MWP). Robots pertaining to this class are composed of two wheels rotating about a central body. The main feature of the MWP pertains to the central body, which can rotate about the wheel axes. As such motion is undesirable, the problem of the stabilization of the central body in MWP is crucial...

s of the 17th Annual Meeting of ESMAC, Oral Presentations / Gait & Posture 28S (2008) S1–S48 S43 Discussion: It is shown that the energy requirement for balance control can be substantial. The average increase of 0.86W/kg in tandem stance with eyes closed, is equivalent to a 17% increase in oxygen consumption during walking, which is a common increase for pathological gait [1] The relation betw...