{"title":"Triple Scissor Extender: A 6-DOF lifting and positioning robot","authors":"Daniel J. Gonzalez, H. Asada","doi":"10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487215","url":null,"abstract":"We present a novel 6 DOF robotic mechanism for reaching high ceilings and positioning an end-effector. The end-effector is supported with three scissor mechanisms that extend towards the ceiling with 6 independent linear actuators moving the base ends of the individual scissors. The top point of each scissor is connected to one of three ball joints located at the three vertices of the top triangular plate holding the end-effector. Coordinated motion of the 6 linear actuators at the base allows the end-effector to reach an arbitrary position with an arbitrary orientation. The design concept of the Triple Scissor Extender is presented, followed by kinematic modeling and analysis of the the Inverse Jacobian relating actuator velocities to the end-effector velocities. The Inverse Jacobian eigenvalues are determined for diverse configurations in order to characterize the kinematic properties. A proof-of-concept prototype has been designed and built. The Inverse Jacobian for use in differential control is evaluated through experiments.","PeriodicalId":200117,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128217175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Max Schwarz, Tobias Rodehutskors, M. Schreiber, Sven Behnke
{"title":"Hybrid driving-stepping locomotion with the wheeled-legged robot Momaro","authors":"Max Schwarz, Tobias Rodehutskors, M. Schreiber, Sven Behnke","doi":"10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487776","url":null,"abstract":"Locomotion in uneven terrain is important for a wide range of robotic applications, including Search&Rescue operations. Our mobile manipulation robot Momaro features a unique locomotion design consisting of four legs ending in pairs of steerable wheels, allowing the robot to omnidirectionally drive on sufficiently even terrain, step over obstacles, and also to overcome height differences by climbing. We demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of this design on the example of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, where our team NimbRo Rescue solved seven out of eight tasks in only 34 minutes. We also introduce a method for semi-autonomous execution of weight-shifting and stepping actions based on a 2D heightmap generated from 3D laser data.","PeriodicalId":200117,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128220483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jonathan Weisz, Yipeng Huang, Florian Lier, S. Sethumadhavan, P. Allen
{"title":"RoboBench: Towards sustainable robotics system benchmarking","authors":"Jonathan Weisz, Yipeng Huang, Florian Lier, S. Sethumadhavan, P. Allen","doi":"10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487514","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487514","url":null,"abstract":"We present RoboBench, a novel platform for sharing robot full-system simulations for benchmarking. The creation of this platform and benchmark suite is motivated by a need for reproducible research. A challenge in creating a full-system benchmarks are incompatibilities in software created by different groups and the difficulty of reproducing software environments. We solve this problem by using software containers, an emerging virtualization technology. RoboBench enables sharing robot software in a runnable state, capturing the software behavior of robots carrying out missions. These simulations make clear the performance impact and resource usage of programs and algorithms relative to other software involved in the mission. These containers are integrated with the CITK platform for reproducible research, which automates generation and publishing of the containers. We present an overview of the system, a description of our prototype set of benchmark missions, along with a validation study comparing the computational load profile of a mission performed on a real and simulated robot. Additionally, we present preliminary results of an overall analysis of the benchmarks in the RoboBench suite, showing where computational work is expended in robotics common robotics tasks. RoboBench is extensible, and is the first step toward a robust, quantitative approach to engineering computationally-efficient robots.","PeriodicalId":200117,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128247273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Optimal navigation policy for an autonomous agent operating in adversarial environments","authors":"Emmanuel Boidot, A. Marzuoli, E. Feron","doi":"10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487483","url":null,"abstract":"We consider an autonomous vehicle navigation problem, whereby a traveler aims at traversing an environment in which an adversary tries to set an ambush. Optimal strategies are computed as random path distributions, a realization of which is the path chosen by the traveler. Theoretical optimal policies are derived under assumptions from the Minimal Cut-Maximal Flow literature. Numerical approaches to compute such optimal strategies are proposed. These numerical approaches, which borrow from randomized path planning techniques, can be implemented for high-dimensional configuration spaces. The methodology developed allows for the application of ambush games on complex environments for realistic applications regarding vehicle routing in adversarial settings.","PeriodicalId":200117,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)","volume":"18 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129272315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alyssa Pierson, Armin Ataei-Esfahani, I. Paschalidis, M. Schwager
{"title":"Cooperative multi-quadrotor pursuit of an evader in an environment with no-fly zones","authors":"Alyssa Pierson, Armin Ataei-Esfahani, I. Paschalidis, M. Schwager","doi":"10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487151","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate the cooperative pursuit of an evader by a group of quadrotors in an environment with no-fly zones. While the pursuers cannot enter into no-fly zones, the evader may freely move through zones to avoid capture. Once the evader enters a no-fly zone, the pursuers calculate a reachable set of evader positions. Using tools from Voronoi-based coverage control applied to the evader's reachable set, we provide an algorithm that distributes the pursuers around the zone's boundary and minimizes the capture time once the evader leaves the no-fly zone. Robust model predictive control (RMPC) tools are used to control the quadrotors and to ensure that they always remain in free space. We demonstrate the performance of our proposed algorithms through a series of experiments on KMEL Nano+ quadrotors.","PeriodicalId":200117,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129279064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. Artigas, R. Balachandran, Cornelia Riecke, Martin Stelzer, Bernhard M. Weber, J. Ryu, A. Albu-Schäffer
{"title":"KONTUR-2: Force-feedback teleoperation from the international space station","authors":"J. Artigas, R. Balachandran, Cornelia Riecke, Martin Stelzer, Bernhard M. Weber, J. Ryu, A. Albu-Schäffer","doi":"10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487246","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a new robot controller for space telerobotics missions specially designed to meet the requirements of KONTUR-2, a German & Russian telerobotics mission that addressed scientific and technological questions for future planetary explorations. In KONTUR-2, Earth and ISS have been used as a test-bed to evaluate and demonstrate a new technology for real-time telemanipulation from space. During the August 2015' experiments campaign, a cosmonaut teleoperated a robot manipulator located in Germany, using a force-feedback joystick from the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS). The focus of the paper is on the design and performance of the bilateral controller between ISS joystick and Earth robot. The controller is based on a 4-Channels architecture in which stability is guaranteed through passivity and the Time Delay Power Network (TDPN) concept. We show how the proposed approach successfully fulfills mission requirements, specially those related to system operation through space links and internet channels, involving time delays and data losses of different nature.","PeriodicalId":200117,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129368952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards lifelong feature-based mapping in semi-static environments","authors":"David M. Rosen, Julian Mason, J. Leonard","doi":"10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487237","url":null,"abstract":"The feature-based graphical approach to robotic mapping provides a representationally rich and computationally efficient framework for an autonomous agent to learn a model of its environment. However, this formulation does not naturally support long-term autonomy because it lacks a notion of environmental change; in reality, “everything changes and nothing stands still, ” and any mapping and localization system that aims to support truly persistent autonomy must be similarly adaptive. To that end, in this paper we propose a novel feature-based model of environmental evolution over time. Our approach is based upon the development of an expressive probabilistic generative feature persistence model that describes the survival of abstract semi-static environmental features over time. We show that this model admits a recursive Bayesian estimator, the persistence filter, that provides an exact online method for computing, at each moment in time, an explicit Bayesian belief over the persistence of each feature in the environment. By incorporating this feature persistence estimation into current state-of-the-art graphical mapping techniques, we obtain a flexible, computationally efficient, and information-theoretically rigorous framework for lifelong environmental modeling in an ever-changing world.","PeriodicalId":200117,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124664649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Robust camera motion estimation using direct edge alignment and sub-gradient method","authors":"Manohar Kuse, S. Shen","doi":"10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487181","url":null,"abstract":"There has been a paradigm shifting trend towards feature-less methods due to their elegant formulation, accuracy and ever increasing computational power. In this work, we present a direct edge alignment approach for 6-DOF tracking. We argue that photo-consistency based methods are plagued by a much smaller convergence basin and are extremely sensitive to noise, changing illumination and fast motion. We propose to use the Distance Transform in the energy formulation which can significantly extend the influence of the edges for tracking. We address the problem of non-differentiability of our cost function and of the previous methods by use of a sub-gradient method. Through extensive experiments we show that the proposed method gives comparable performance to the previous method under nominal conditions and is able to run at 30 Hz in single threaded mode. In addition, under large motion we demonstrate our method outperforms previous methods using the same runtime configuration for our method.","PeriodicalId":200117,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124713138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alexander M. Schmidts, Manuel Schneider, Markus Kuhne, A. Peer
{"title":"A new interaction force decomposition maximizing compensating forces under physical work constraints","authors":"Alexander M. Schmidts, Manuel Schneider, Markus Kuhne, A. Peer","doi":"10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487698","url":null,"abstract":"In manipulation tasks interaction forces are often decomposed to be able to control robustness-reflective and accelerating forces separately. While this decomposition is typically performed for the synthesis of interaction forces to be applied for example in the context of robotic grasping, less attention has been paid to the analysis of measured, human interaction forces. Here, we introduce a physically-motivated bounding constraint, based on the law of energy conservation, and present a new decomposition approach for interaction force analysis with rigid objects. The decomposition extends the intuitive solution known in literature for the two finger grasp by maximizing robustness-reflective forces while respecting the bounding constraint. Advantages of our approach are illustrated in numerical examples and experiments and by comparing it to existing decomposition approaches. In contrast to existing approaches, our new approach is not limited in the number of interaction points and incorporates only individual interaction forces which are physically plausible.","PeriodicalId":200117,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130545087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
F. Negrello, M. Garabini, M. Catalano, P. Kryczka, Wooseok Choi, D. Caldwell, A. Bicchi, N. Tsagarakis
{"title":"WALK-MAN humanoid lower body design optimization for enhanced physical performance","authors":"F. Negrello, M. Garabini, M. Catalano, P. Kryczka, Wooseok Choi, D. Caldwell, A. Bicchi, N. Tsagarakis","doi":"10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487327","url":null,"abstract":"The deployment of robots to assist in environments hostile for humans during emergency scenarios require robots to demonstrate enhanced physical performance, that includes adequate power, adaptability and robustness to physical interactions and efficient operation. This work presents the design and development of the lower body of the new high performance humanoid WALK-MAN, a robot developed recently to assist in disaster response scenarios. The paper introduces the details of the WALK-MAN lower-body, highlighting the innovative design optimization features considered to maximize the leg performance. Starting from the general lower body specifications the objectives of the design and how they were addressed are introduced, including the selection of the leg kinematics, the arrangement of the actuators and their integration with the leg structure to maximize the range of motion, reduce the leg mass and inertia, and shape the leg mass distribution for better dynamic performance. Physical robustness is ensured with the integration of elastic transmission and impact energy absorbing covers. Experimental walking trials demonstrate the correct operation of the legs while executing a walking gait.","PeriodicalId":200117,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129101579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}