R. Onishi, Ryoma Kitamura, Takashi Takuma, W. Kase
{"title":"Effect of arm swinging and trunk twisting on bipedal locomotion","authors":"R. Onishi, Ryoma Kitamura, Takashi Takuma, W. Kase","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968302","url":null,"abstract":"It is expected that human locomotion, in which the trunk twists and arms swing, provides stability as well as compensation for the angular momentum because the trunk and arms are placed over legs and then their position and the acceleration influence the bipedal locomotion. This paper presents a bipedal robot equipped with a trunk, embedding a viscoelastic joint and two arms away from the midline of the trunk. Physical experiments show that a passive oscillation of the viscoelastic trunk joint around the yaw axis vertical to the ground and a swing of heavy arms provided an oscillation of zero moment point (ZMP) in the lateral direction and a small oscillation in the anteroposterior direction. This is despite the fact that the robot does not have a roll joint and the arm swings back and forth. Numerical analysis supports the results of the physical experiments through a simple model and by expressing ZMP trajectory, showing that the arm swinging facilitates antiphase locomotion in which right arm and left leg swings ahead and vice versa.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"111 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129674218","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":"Local Pose optimization with an Attention-based Neural Network","authors":"Yiling Liu, Hesheng Wang, Fan Xu, Yong Wang, Weidong Chen, Qirong Tang","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968524","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we propose a novel pose optimizer which can be inserted into either supervised or unsupervised end-to-end visual odometry for the purpose of local pose optimization. The pose optimizer is an analogue of the pose graph optimization used in traditional VSLAM algorithms. Local pose optimization is performed by an attention-based neural network which iteratively refines the predicted pose estimates of an image snippet. Instead of complicated graph convolutional network, the attention mechanism based on geometric consistency of trajectory constraint is utilized because pose features whose spatial distribution is not important can be flattened to vectors and then processed. The pose optimizer is aimed at improving pose estimation accuracy by redistributing errors of pose estimates. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the proposed approach on the KITTI Odometry dataset [1] is presented to demonstrate its effectiveness in improving pose estimation accuracy and minimizing pose drift.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128301931","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}
Aikaterini Smyrli, Mehdi Ghiassi, A. Kecskeméthy, E. Papadopoulos
{"title":"On the effect of semielliptical foot shape on the energetic efficiency of passive bipedal gait*","authors":"Aikaterini Smyrli, Mehdi Ghiassi, A. Kecskeméthy, E. Papadopoulos","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967565","url":null,"abstract":"This paper studies the effects of varying rollover curvature on the passive dynamic gait of a biped walker. The dynamic model of a compliant biped robot is extended with the implementation of semielliptical feet, to mimic human rollingradius progression during a step. The process of modeling the semielliptical foot shape and integrating its kinematics to the biped’s dynamics is presented in detail. The passive dynamic behavior of the biped for elliptic feet of various dimensions is investigated through numerical simulations to provide results about gait stability, walking speed, energetic efficiency, and impact force levels. The concept of energetic efficiency in passive walking is discussed thoroughly, and an efficiency comparison methodology is proposed. Finally, it is shown that the biomimetically-inspired semielliptical foot profile can lead to higher gait efficiency. The results of this study can be used to optimize energetic efficiency in biped walking machines and/or gait assisting prosthetic equipment by means of foot shape optimization.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128385334","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":"Human Intention Inference and On-Line Human Hand Motion Prediction for Human-Robot Collaboration","authors":"R. Luo, Licong Mai","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968192","url":null,"abstract":"With recent development of robotic technology, it is increasingly common that robot coexist with human, in which humans and robots share a common workspace and work in close proximity. To maintain efficiency and ensure safety under these circumstances, robot should have the ability to predict the future human motion based on the observed on-going motion. In this paper, we present a methodology for on-line inference of human intention and prediction of human hand motion. The proposed framework is built using Probabilistic Dynamic Movement Primitive (PDMP). In the off-line stage, a set of PDMPs is constructed based on the recorded demonstrations and they will then be used for inferring human intention and predicting human hand motion in the on-line stage. A proof of concept evaluation is carried out in a tabletop manipulation task. Experimental result shows the proposed framework achieve high performance in human intention inference and in the trajectory similarity between the predicted and the actual hand movement under the normally defined environment. We also show the proposed framework can adapt and generalize to the newly defined environment.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128988600","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":"Vision-based magnetic platform for actuator positioning and wireless control of microrobots","authors":"A. Zarrouk, K. Belharet, Omar Tahri","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968495","url":null,"abstract":"This work presents a method to guide microrobots by positioning a magnetic actuator using hybrid vision system. The used actuator mounted at a robot end-effector creates local maxima of the magnetic field magnitude, which results in an attractive point for microrobots in its influence zone. The hybrid vision system serves to control the actuator position through the robotic platform to make the trapped microrobot undergo a planned trajectory. In first validation results, the particle driving is achieved in open loop with no adjustment with respect to the planned trajectory. Such scheme can be used in the case where the microrobot position can not be measured in real time. The second validation results deal with the case of microrobot positioning by visual servoing. This can be used in the case where recovering microrobot position is possible, for example in eye treatment.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124555669","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":"Learning Based Robotic Bin-picking for Potentially Tangled Objects","authors":"Ryo Matsumura, Y. Domae, Weiwei Wan, K. Harada","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968295","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968295","url":null,"abstract":"In this research, we tackle the challenge of picking only one object from a randomly stacked pile where the objects can potentially be tangled. No solution has been proposed to solve this challenge due to the complexity of picking one and only one object from the bin of tangled objects. Therefore, we propose a method for avoiding the situation where a robot picks multiple objects. In our proposed method, first, grasping pose candidates are computed by using the graspability index. Then, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is trained to predict whether or not the robot can pick one and only one object from the bin. Additionally, since a physics simulator is used to collect data to train the CNN, an automatic picking system can be built. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed through experiments on robot Nextage and compare with previous bin-picking methods.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129867169","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}
Martin Scheiber, J. Delaune, R. Brockers, S. Weiss
{"title":"Visual-Inertial On-Board Throw-and-Go Initialization for Micro Air Vehicles","authors":"Martin Scheiber, J. Delaune, R. Brockers, S. Weiss","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967575","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967575","url":null,"abstract":"We propose an approach to the throw-and-go (TnG) problem for micro air vehicles (MAVs) using visual and inertial sensors. The key challenge is the fast on-board initialization of the visual odometry (VO) system, which usually requires user input to recover the visual scale. Our approach is based on the identification of the gravity vector from the acceleration data computed with images of the ground during in free fall. This enables scaling of the poses reconstructed with visual information. The proposed framework use inertial data to control the MAV attitude so the ground is visible after the throw. Using image to image homography a metric scale is estimated with which the MAV’s height is propagated. Unlike existing literature, this approach requires no additional sensor nor user input or pre-throw assumptions and can recover from any initial attitude. We show results on both simulation and real data.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130377574","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":"RoFICoM – First Open-Hardware Connector for Metamorphic Robots","authors":"J. Mrázek, J. Barnat","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968167","url":null,"abstract":"We present RoFICoM, a new retractable connection device that allows for mechanical, electric, and data communication connection between separable robotic modules. The device is intentionally designed to be used in lattice-type metamorphic robots, however, its applicability is much wider. The main novelty of our solution lies primarily in a new unique flat design and spatial compactness of the connector. With a flat connector, much more space is left for the body of a robotic module in the structure. Moreover, the connector is also fully self-contained device with well defined mechanical, electrical and data interfaces, hence it can be easily embedded in various robotic solutions. Our RoFICoM connector is easy to produce, it is open-hardware and free for non-commercial use. In the paper, we give construction details and report on a couple of experiments we performed to demonstrate key features of the connection achieved with two RoFICoM devices.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130409106","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":"Online Performance Prediction and Profiling of Human Activities by Observation","authors":"Emmanouil Hourdakis, M. Maniadakis, P. Trahanias","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967707","url":null,"abstract":"The capacity of a system to automatically analyze and predict the performance of a human in a particular task can provide important information in Human-Robot Interaction. Despite its usefulness, the above topic has received rather limited attention in the literature. In the current work, we introduce a method for performance prediction and profiling of human activities. Using little information about a task, our method is able to extract the characteristic motion patterns of an agent, analyze them and predict his/her performance in a given activity. We demonstrate the robustness of the method in several different activities, that involve both periodic and oscillatory primitive motions. In addition, we evaluate it thoroughly on data obtained from public datasets and discuss its usefulness for contemporary robotic applications.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130521155","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}
Andrew I. McLaren, Zak Fitzgerald, Geng Gao, Minas Liarokapis
{"title":"A Passive Closing, Tendon Driven, Adaptive Robot Hand for Ultra-Fast, Aerial Grasping and Perching","authors":"Andrew I. McLaren, Zak Fitzgerald, Geng Gao, Minas Liarokapis","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968076","url":null,"abstract":"Current grasping methods for aerial vehicles are slow, inaccurate and they cannot adapt to any target object. Thus, they do not allow for on-the-fly, ultra-fast grasping. In this paper, we present a passive closing, adaptive robot hand design that offers ultra-fast, aerial grasping for a wide range of everyday objects. We investigate alternative uses of structural compliance for the development of simple, adaptive robot grippers and hands and we propose an appropriate quick release mechanism that facilitates an instantaneous grasping execution. The quick release mechanism is triggered by a simple distance sensor. The proposed hand utilizes only two actuators to control multiple degrees of freedom over three fingers and it retains the superior grasping capabilities of adaptive grasping mechanisms, even under significant object pose or other environmental uncertainties. The hand achieves a grasping time of 96 ms, a maximum grasping force of 56 N and it is able to secure objects of various shapes at high speeds. The proposed hand can serve as the end-effector of grasping capable Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platforms and it can offer perching capabilities, facilitating autonomous docking.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130620464","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}