Development of a folding arm on an articulated mobile robot for plant disaster prevention

Abstract

In this work, we develop a folding arm on an articulated mobile robot to inspect an industrial plant. The design targets of the arm, its operations, measurement ability, and mobility, were set for the task of inspecting an industrial plant. To accomplish the targets, we designed the folding arm considering both accessibility to high locations and the mobility of the articulated mobile robot to which it is attached. The arm has links, joints, dummy wheels, and sensors and enables the robot to which it is attached to manipulate objects, e.g. rotating valves, opening a door, or inspecting by accessing high locations. In addition, changing the posture of the arm and touching the dummy wheel in the arm to the surrounding terrain can reduce any negative effect of the arm on the robot's mobility when it encounters narrow spaces, stairs, steps, and trenches. The arm is controlled as a six degrees-of-freedom manipulator without redundancy by an operator who directly sets two joint angles. The effectiveness of the developed arm was demonstrated not only through experiments in a laboratory but also in a field test at the Plant Disaster Prevention Challenge of the World Robot Summit 2018.     

Sliding mode control for trajectory tracking of mobile robot in the RFID sensor space

This paper presents a sliding mode control method for wheeled mobile robots. Because of the nonlinear and nonholonomic properties, it is difficult to establish an appropriate model of the mobile robot system for trajectory tracking. A robust control law which is called sliding mode control is proposed for asymptotically stabilizing the mobile robot to a desired trajectory. The posture of the mobile robot (including the position and heading direction) is presented and the kinematics equations are established in the two-dimensional coordinates. According to the kinematics equations, the controller is designed to find an acceptable control law so that the tracking error will approximate 0 as the time approaches infinity with an initial error. The RFID sensor space is used to estimate the real posture of the mobile robot. Simulation and experiment demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system for robust tracking of mobile robots. Recommended by Sooyong Lee under the direction of Editor Jae-Bok Song. This work was supported by the Korea Science and Engineering (KOSEF) grant funded by the Korea government (MOST) (No. R01-2007-000-10171-0). Jun Ho Lee received the M.S degree in Mechanical Engineering from Pusan National University. His research interests include factory automation and sliding mode control. Cong Lin received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Jilin University and the M.S degree in Electrical Engineering from Pusan National University. His research interests include neural network and sliding mode control. Hoon Lim is currently a M.S student in Electrical Engineering of Pusan National University. His research interests include mobile manipulator and sliding mode control. Jang Myung Lee received the B.S. and M.S degrees in Electronics Engineering from Seoul National University, Korea. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Now, he is a Professor in Pusan National University. His research interests include integrated manufacturing systems and intelligent control.     

Master-slave intelligent robot telepresence system

In this paper, the analysis and design of master-slave intelligent robot telepresence system are discussed. When the operator acts on the master manipulator, the position and attitude information of the master manipulator are gathered by the computer. After calculating and coordinate transforming, the data are send to the computer of the slave manipulator. Then the slave manipulator-PUMA562 robot follows the master manipulator's movement precisely. Six-dimension force/toque sensor(lord cell) is mounted on the slave manipulator. As the master manipulator and the toque on the slave manipulator are different in structure, the force and the slave manipulator should be send to the master manipulator computer and dissociated by the master manipulator computer. Proper ratio of the force on the master manipulator and the force on the slave manipulator is selected, and distribute to the master manipulator joints. So that the operator could feel the force from the master manipulator, which is obtained by the motors of the joints. The proposed control scheme is introduced to a prototype master-slave system and the experimental results show the validity of the proposed scheme.     

System centroid position based tipover stability enhancement method for a tracked search and rescue robot

Tipover may cause fatal damages to the mobile robot system during obstacle crossing or stair climbing, and the system centroid position (SCP) is very important for the tipover stability. By monitoring the SCP, it is possible to estimate the risk of tipover and take appropriate actions to prevent the incident from happening. This paper proposes a new tipover avoidance method for enhancing the tipover stability of a tracked mobile manipulator by online adjusting the SCP. The tipover stability criteria for the robot are discussed based on the orientation data from a three-axial gyroscope and the SCP calculation. The velocity kinematic model of the manipulator for SCP adjustment is also presented in this paper. In addition, a redundancy resolution method is employed in order to improve the performance of the robot. The proposed method is applied to a search and rescue robot consists of a four degree of freedom manipulator and a tracked mobile base, and the effectiveness of this method is demonstrated by experimental results.     

Upper-body haptic system for snake robot teleoperation in pipelines

Snake robots have shown a great potential for operations in confined workplaces that are less accessible or dangerous to human workers, such as the in-pipe inspection. However, the snake robot teleoperation remains a nontrivial task due to the unique locomotion mechanism (e.g., helical motion) and the constraints of the workplaces including the low visibility and indistinguishable features. Most snake robot feedback systems are based on the live camera view only. It is hard for the human operator to develop a correct spatial understanding of the remote workplace, leading to problems such as disorientation and motion sickness in snake robot teleoperation. This study designs and evaluates an innovative haptic assistant system for snake robot teleoperation in the in-pipe inspection. An upper-body haptic suit with 40 vibrators on both the front and back sides of the human operator was developed to generate haptic feedback corresponding to the bottom and up sides of the snake robot, transferring the egocentric sensation of the snake robot to the human operator. A human-subject experiment (n = 31) was performed to evaluate the efficacy of the developed system. The results indicate that the proposed haptic assistant system outperformed other feedback systems in terms of both task performance and subjective workload and motion sickness evaluations. It inspires new control and feedback designs for the future snake robot in industrial operations.     

Development and field test of the articulated mobile robot T2 Snake-4 for plant disaster prevention

Abstract

In this work, we develop an articulated mobile robot that can move in narrow spaces, climb stairs, gather information, and operate valves for plant disaster prevention. The robot can adopt a tall position using a folding arm and gather information using sensors mounted on the arm. In addition, this paper presents a stair climbing method using a single backward wave. This method enables the robot to climb stairs that have a short tread. The developed robot system is tested in a field test at the World Robot Summit 2018, and the lessons learned in the field test are discussed.     

Fuzzy-based-admittance controller for safe natural human–robot interaction

ABSTRACT

In recent years, a great amount of research on physical human–robot interaction has been conducted, and mainly concentrated on safety issues to minimize the risk of accidents to the operator during the cooperation between human and robot. Unfortunately, the identification of inertia and damping matrices in the dynamic admittance model is time-consuming, which is still an open problem of previous admittance controllers. Additionally, the natural cooperation is that cooperative movements are implemented in every degree of freedom in space, which is rarely concerned while it is important to implement more complex cooperative movements, and to help operator feels naturally during the cooperation. This paper presents an alternative admittance controller based on inference mechanism of fuzzy logic to eliminate the identification of inertia and damping matrices during the process of controller formulation in which the end-effector’s velocity is adaptively adjusted via external wrench (force/torque measured by a sensor mounted on end-effector) and power transmitted by the robot. Moreover, the proposed controller also considers end-effector’s full DOF to guarantee the natural human–robot interaction. The fuzzy-admittance controller is evaluated by an experimental set-up of teaching task using 6-DOF manipulator in which manipulator moves passively via the human impact on real-time force/torque sensor mounted on end-effector.     

Design and experimental validation of a second-order sliding-mode motion controller for robot manipulators

This article presents an original motion control strategy for robot manipulators based on the coupling of the inverse dynamics method with the so-called second-order sliding mode control approach. Using this method, in principle, all the coupling non-linearities in the dynamical model of the manipulator are compensated, transforming the multi-input non-linear system into a linear and decoupled one. Actually, since the inverse dynamics relies on an identified model, some residual uncertain terms remain and perturb the linear and decoupled system. This motivates the use of a robust control design approach to complete the control scheme. In this article the sliding mode control methodology is adopted. Sliding mode control has many appreciable features, such as design simplicity and robustness versus a wide class of uncertainties and disturbances. Yet conventional sliding mode control seems inappropriate to be applied in robotics since it can generate the so-called chattering effect, which can be destructive for the controlled robot. In this article, this problem is suitably circumvented by designing a second-order sliding mode controller capable of generating a continuous control law making the proposed sliding mode controller actually applicable to industrial robots. To build the inverse dynamics part of the proposed controller, a suitable dynamical model of the system has been formulated, and its parameters have been accurately identified relying on a practical MIMO identification procedure recently devised. The proposed inverse dynamics-based second-order sliding mode controller has been experimentally tested on a COMAU SMART3-S2 industrial manipulator, demonstrating the tracking properties and the good performances of the controlled system.     

自主移动机器人自适应室外道路检测

目的 为降低室外自主移动机器人视觉导航中遇到的阴影、裂纹及道路边界不规则造成的道路检测算法不鲁棒性,提出一种每帧灰度阈值可调的快速自适应道路检测方法。方法 先采用2维离散小波进行道路图像分解与重构,比较各级小波重构后的近似道路图像,确定出不影响“路-非路”灰度二分类的最佳分辨率等级;在低分辨率尺度空间中,用灰度类间最大方差和类内最小方差共同构造适应度函数,采用改进的遗传算法对各帧道路图像进行阈值自适应分割,找到准确的道路边界,最近两边界中心位置即机器人行驶方向。采用小型陆地自主车作为研究平台,并在卡耐基梅隆大学（CMU）提供的室外移动机器人道路视频中进行算法测试。结果 本文方法能够在具有阴影、裂纹、光照度变化的道路条件下鲁棒分割出道路边界,机器人可以平均30 km/h的速度在有较严重阴影干扰的校园道路上行驶,视觉系统的处理速度平均可达到20 ms/帧。结论 本文方法比传统的灰度直方图分割法表现出更强的环境自适应性,可实现较为鲁棒的室外道路检测,并可作为室外自主移动机器人非结构化道路检测的一种鲁棒性较强的方法加以推广。     

利用平面单应分解实现服务机器人视觉伺服

智能空间中家庭服务机器人所需完成的主要任务是协助人完成物品的搜寻、定位与传递。而视觉伺服则是完成上述任务的有效手段。搭建了由移动机器人、机械臂、摄像头组成的家庭服务机器人视觉伺服系统,建立了此系统的运动学模型并对安装在机械臂末端执行器上的视觉系统进行了内外参数标定,通过分解世界平面的单应来获取目标物品的位姿参数,利用所获取的位姿参数设计了基于位置的视觉伺服控制律。实验结果表明,使用平面单应分解方法来设计控制律可简单有效地完成家庭物品的视觉伺服任务。     

Auditory scene reproduction for tele-operated robot systems

ABSTRACT

In a tele-operated robot environment, reproducing auditory scenes and conveying 3D spatial information of sound sources are inevitable in order to make operators feel more realistic tele-presence. In this paper, we propose a tele-presence robot system that enables reproduction and manipulation of auditory scenes. This tele-presence system is carried out on the basis of 3D information about where targeted humans are speaking, and matching with the operator's head orientation. We employed multiple microphone arrays and human tracking technologies to localize and separate voices around a robot. In the operator site, separated sound sources are rendered using head-related transfer functions (HRTF) according to the sound sources' spatial positions and the operator's head orientation that is being tracked real time. Two-party and three-party interaction experiments indicated that the proposed system has significantly higher accuracy when perceiving direction of sounds and gains higher subjective scores in sense of presence and listenability, compared to a baseline system which uses stereo binaural sounds obtained by two microphones mounted on the humanoid robot's ears.     

Development of the multi-functional indoor service robot PSR systems

This paper discusses the development of the multi-functional indoor service robot PSR (Public Service Robots) systems. We have built three versions of PSR systems, which are the mobile manipulator PSR-1 and PSR-2, and the guide robot Jinny. The PSR robots successfully accomplished four target service tasks including a delivery, a patrol, a guide, and a floor cleaning task. These applications were defined from our investigation on service requirements of various indoor public environments. This paper shows how mobile-manipulator typed service robots were developed towards intelligent agents in a real environment. We identified system integration, multi-functionality, and autonomy considering environmental uncertainties as key research issues. Our research focused on solving these issues, and the solutions can be considered as the distinct features of our systems. Several key technologies were developed to satisfy technological consistency through the proposed integration scheme. Woojin Chung was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1970. He received the B.S. at the department of mechanical design and production engineering, Seoul National University in 1993. He received the M.S. degree in 1995 and Ph.D degree in 1998 at the department of Mechano-Informatics, the University of Tokyo. He was a senior research scientist at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology from 1998 to 2005. He joined the department of mechanical engineering, Korea University in 2005 as an assistant professor. He received an excellent paper award from the Robotics Society of Japan in 1996 and a best transactions paper award from the IEEE robotics and automation society in 2002. His research interests include the design and control of nonholonomic underactuated mechanical systems, trailer system design and control, mobile robot navigation, a dexterous robot hand and a system integration of intelligent robots. He is a member of the IEEE, the robotics society of Japan, the institute of control, automation and systems engineers and the Korea robotics society. Gunhee Kim received the B.S. and M.S. degrees at the department of mechanical engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea, in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He was a research scientist in Intelligent Robotics Research Center, at Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), Korea, from 2001 to 2006. Currently, he is a graduate student in the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include computer vision, artificial intelligence, mobile robot navigation, and discrete event systems. He is a member of the IEEE. Munsang Kim received the B.S. and M.S degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Seoul National University in 1980 and 1982 respectively and the Dr.-Ing. degree in Robotics from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany in 1987. Since 1987 he has been working as a research scientist at Korea Institute of Science and Technology. He has led the Intelligent Robotics Research Center since 2000 and became the director of the “Intelligent Robot—The Frontier 21 Program” since Oct. 2003. His current research interests are design and control of novel mobile manipulation systems, haptic device design and control, and sensor application to intelligent robots.     

Plant inspection by using a ground vehicle and an aerial robot: lessons learned from plant disaster prevention challenge in world robot summit 2018

Abstract

In recent years, to prevent accidents and disaster are desired by implementing maintenance and management of facilities, such as conducting periodic inspections with appropriate frequency at plants. However, because the dangerous materials such as flammable gas and explosives is used in a plant, and there are many dangerous places in a plant such as high-temperature environment and high places and narrow spaces, it is desirable to use a remote-controlled robot for safety work and short inspections. Against this background, the Disaster Robotics Category-Plant Disaster Prevention Challenge was held in Japan at the World Robot Summit 2018. Our team was ranked 3rd in this competition, because our strategy of ‘inspection and investigation in cooperation with UGV and UAV’ was effective. In this paper, the competition contents of World Robot Summit 2018 and the robot inspection system that we are studying are explained. And what kind of strategy was challenged and result for these given competition tasks by using our robot system are introduced. And the lessons learned such as advantages and issues in UGV and UAV collaboration work at this competition are described for evaluate a robot investigation system for disaster response and inspection work at plants.     

Development of a single-wheeled inverted pendulum robot capable of climbing stairs

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we propose the design of a single-wheeled robot capable of climbing stairs. The robot is equipped with the proposed climbing mechanism, which enables it to climb stairs. The mechanism has an extremely simple structure, comprised of a parallel arm, belt, harmonic drive, and pulley. The proposed climbing mechanism has the advantage of not requiring an additional actuator because it can be driven by using a single actuator that drives the wheel. The robot is equipped with a control moment gyroscope to control the stability in a lateral direction. Experimental results demonstrate that the robot can climb stairs with a riser height of 12–13?cm and a tread depth of 39?cm at an approximate rate of 2 to 3 s for each step.     

Task-oriented programming of large redundant robot motion

Large robots are a new domain of advanced robotics. Examples of their application fields are tasks like operations on large free-form surfaces, especially aircraft cleaning and removing paint from hulls. They are equipped with a programmable robot control comparable to a control system used for industrial robots. However, conventional teach-in methods are not able to manage the complexity of programming large redundant robot operation on free-form geometries. The Fraunhofer IPA has developed an innovative off-line programming system that allows the creation of robot motion programs which satisfy time and energy optimization criteria. This system helps to avoid collisions within the workspace and to fulfill conditions that arise from the robot kinematics and dynamics. This advanced programming system has been successfully used to generate motion programs for the world's largest mobile robot, the aircraft cleaning manipulator SKYWASH. In this context offline programs for eleven different types of aircraft have been developed.     

Development of a new spinning gait for a planar snake robot using central pattern generators

In this paper, we first present dynamic equation of n-link snake robot using Lagrange’s method in a simplified matrix form and verify them experimentally. Next, we introduce a new locomotion mode called spinning gait. Central pattern generators (CPGs) are used for online gait generation. To realize spinning gait, genetic algorithm is used to find optimal CPG network parameters. We illustrate both theoretically, using derived robot dynamics and experimentally that the CPG-based online gait generation method allows continuous and rather smooth transitions between gaits. Lastly, we present an application where the snake robot is guided from an initial to final position while avoiding obstacles by changing CPG parameters.     

Actuator fault detection for masonry robot manipulator arm with the interval observer

The main construction method of building wall is artificial masonry, the main problem is that the process is associated with low construction efficiency and poor safety, workers are prone fall from high altitude. The research of automatic masonry robot has become an urgent need. The masonry mechanical arm system is the main executing part of the masonry robot, special attention should be paid to the robot fault. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a suitable model to detect the actuator faults of the manipulator system. In this paper, a dynamic model of manipulator fault is presented and a fault detection scheme of masonry robot manipulator arm is proposed based on the model. The model is simplified by analyzing the state parameters of each joint during robot masonry and the interval observer with more design freedom was designed based on the established mathematical model of actuator faults. In this paper, a joint method for solving S and L matrices is proposed, which avoids the limitation of the traditional method for solving L matrices by two-step. In the presence of external interference, $l_1$/$H_{\infty }$ performance are introduced into the generation process of residual interval, and the interval observer has better disturbance robustness and fault sensitivity. Simulation experiments verify that the scheme can effectively detect the actuator fault of the manipulator, and experiments are carried out on a 6-axis manipulator. The experimental results show that when actuator faults occur at joints 2 and 3, the residual rapidly exceeds the threshold range, which proves the effectiveness of the fault detection scheme designed in this paper.     

Walking-support robot system for walking rehabilitation: design and control

An intelligent walking-assistance robot system has been developed to help the elderly or the disabled in rehabilitation programs. From the design viewpoint, several different mechanisms to satisfy the strict requirements for use in a rehabilitation program were considered and studied. A two-wheel mobile mechanism was developed to provide motions to follow the patient's walking trajectory, and also to make the patient follow a specified trajectory. Equations of motion were derived for the unloading control, and a force control algorithm was developed. For motion control of the mobile base, virtual trajectory planning by the B-spline method and PID control were used. Sensing the motion of the patient is performed by a linear potentiometer and a rotating encoder attached to the robot manipulator. The system was tested on patients in hospital and the experimental results are reported.     

Task decoupling in robot manipulators

Task decoupling in robotic manipulators implies that there is a subset of joints primarily responsible for the completion of a subset of the manipulator task. In this paper, we take a novel and general view of task decoupling in which we identify link subsystems primarily responsible for completion of a subset of the manipulator task components, which is not necessarily position or orientation. Our analysis leads to the discovery of other decoupled manipulator geometries never identified before, wherein the decoupled system is responsible for a subset of degress-of-freedom involving a hybrid combination of both position and orientation. Closed-form inverse kinematic solutions for these manipulator geometries are therefore guaranteed. Task decoupling also implied singularity decoupling wherein singularities of decoupled subsystems are equivalent to the manipulator singularities. The analysis leads to a novel and efficient method for identifying the singularities and solving the inverse kinematics problem of six-axes manipulators with decoupled geometries. The practicality of the concepts introduced is demonstrated through an industrial robot example involving a hybrid position and orientation decoupling.