A cleaning robot based on the ultrasonic principle is designed. With the single chip microcomputer AT89C52 and ultrasonic sensors, the robot can achieve the function of intelligent obstacle avoidance, automatic control and automatic sweeping. In the cleaning robot, a rotating cylindrical brush is used in front of the robot and it sweeps garbages into the dustbin in the process of movement, and ...

We report a study of a human-robot system composed of a science team (located in Pittsburgh), an engineering team (located in Chile), and a robot (located in Chile). We performed ethnographic observations simultaneously at both sites over two weeks as scientists collected data using the robot. Our data reveal problems in establishing and maintaining common ground between the science team and th...

This article presents a project that aims at constructing a biologically inspired amphibious snake-like robot. The robot is designed to be capable of anguilliform swimming like the lamprey in water and serpentine locomotion like a snake on ground. Both the structure and the controller of the robot are inspired by elongate vertebrates. In particular, the locomotion of the robot is controlled by ...

The walking of a bipedal robot is composed of different phases such as single support (SS) with flat foot, SS with foot rotation around the metatarsal axis and double support. During every walking phase there is a dynamic model and a contact with the ground. Thus, an appropriated control law has to be implemented for each phase. Generally, the type of contact with the ground is imposed but it i...

This paper describes an absolute localisation method for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) if GPS is unavailable for the vehicle. The basic idea is to combine an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to the ground vehicle and use it as an external sensor platform to achieve an absolute localisation of the robotic team. Beside the discussion of the rather naive method directly using the GPS position of t...

Legged locomotion on flowing ground (e.g., granular media) is unlike locomotion on hard ground because feet experience both solid- and fluid-like forces during surface penetration. Recent bioinspired legged robots display speed relative to body size on hard ground comparable with high-performing organisms like cockroaches but suffer significant performance loss on flowing materials like sand. I...

Vehicle dynamics is typically handled by models whose parameters are found through system identification or manually computed from the vehicle’s characteristics. While these methods provide accurate theoretical dynamical models, they may not take into account differences between individual vehicles, lack adaptability to new environments and may not handle sophisticated models, requiring hand-cr...

A robot satellite with dual-manipulators is one of the choices to operate payload in orbit, for example, to capture or deorbit damaged satellites. We have constructed a ground experiment simulator system including two 7-degree-of-freedom (DOF) manipulators as a chaser satellite model and floating testbeds on a flat floor as target satellite models. This system is a tele-operation ground experim...

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...

this paper proposes a gait planning approach to reduce the required friction for a biped robot walking on various surfaces. to this end, a humanoid robot with 18 dof is considered to develop a dynamics model for studying various 3d manoeuvres. then, feasible trajectories are developed to alleviate the fluctuations on the upper body to resemble human-like walking. in order to generate feasible w...