International Journal of Robotics Research最新文献

{"title":"A low-noise low-impedance powered knee prosthesis with direct ball screw drive and torque-sensitive actuation.","authors":"Brendon Ortolano, Lukas Gabert, Tommaso Lenzi","doi":"10.1177/02783649251383018","DOIUrl":"10.1177/02783649251383018","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The standard of care for individuals with above-knee amputation is the microprocessor-controlled knee prosthesis-a lightweight and quiet device that can actively regulate joint resistance but cannot generate positive power like biological legs during ambulation. Powered prostheses aim to address this limitation with robotic actuators. However, limitations of conventional robotic actuators result in powered prostheses that are either heavy, loud, and have high joint impedance or lack sufficient torque and power to replicate key biomechanical functions of the biological leg. These limitations have limited the clinical success of powered knee prostheses. In this paper, we show that combining quasi-direct drive with a variable transmission in a novel torque-sensitive actuator can overcome the limitations of conventional actuators in robotic knee prostheses. Theoretical analysis shows that this combination of technologies substantially extends the range of torques and speeds of an electromechanical actuator without increasing its output impedance. Mechatronics implementation of the proposed design concept into a robotic knee prosthesis confirms the torque, speed, and output impedance improvements predicted by theoretical modeling. Amputee testing verifies that the proposed knee prosthesis can provide joint torques and speeds up to 145 Nm and 550 deg/s, enabling the user to ambulate on stairs and walk at 2.5 m/s. The prosthesis achieves lower impedance than the biological knee and approximates the weight (1.9 kg) and noise (45-53 dBA) of passive microprocessor-controlled knee prostheses. By enabling lightweight, quiet, and powerful prostheses, the proposed actuation concept has the potential to improve the quality of life in individuals with above-knee amputations.</p>","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13015942/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147522755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Configuration identification of on-demand variable stiffness strain-limiting layers in zig-zag soft pneumatic actuators using deep learning methods.","authors":"Palpolage Don Shehan Hiroshan Gunawardane, Duhyeon Lee, Phoebe Cheung, Hao Zhou, Gursel Alici, Mu Chiao","doi":"10.1177/02783649251364287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649251364287","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) typically offer a fixed trajectory, resulting in one specific tip motion for a given range of pressure. When multiple trajectories are needed, these actuators require re-fabrication with altered structural designs, with different lengths, chamber sizes, and wall thicknesses etc. Passive modular variable stiffness SPAs present a significant advantage by enabling the realization of many distinct trajectories without structural redesign. Although various mathematical modeling techniques are widely used to predict their tip motion by treating it a kinematics problem, solving the inverse problem in the presence of modular strain-limiting layer (SLL) configurations is challenging. It is essential to determine the configuration of such a slender actuator in the form of a robot manipulator to deploy it for a specific function and application without re-fabricating them, by simply varying the SLL per the configuration required for a particular tip-point trajectory. To this aim, this paper introduces a hybrid methodology (based on feed-forward neural network) and a convolutional neural network-based method to predict the required SLL configuration for a particular tip trajectory of the SPA. This methodology is generic enough to apply to such actuators to predict their configuration as per their specific tip point trajectory in Cartesian space. The results presented for a slender SPA have demonstrated that the proposed method has predicted its configurations for a range of applications typified by an endoscope prototype, a soft robotic gripping application, and a system mimicking human finger movement with an average error of 1.65%. This study offers a versatile methodology for \"function and application specific\" SPAs or robot manipulators without re-fabricating them, by strategically combining SLL and machine learning-based prediction to generate a specific trajectory.</p>","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"45 4","pages":"628-644"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13061313/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147647548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Certifiably optimal rotation and pose estimation based on the Cayley map.","authors":"Timothy D Barfoot, Connor Holmes, Frederike Dümbgen","doi":"10.1177/02783649241269337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649241269337","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We present novel, convex relaxations for rotation and pose estimation problems that can <i>a posteriori</i> guarantee global optimality for practical measurement noise levels. Some such relaxations exist in the literature for specific problem setups that assume the matrix von Mises-Fisher distribution (a.k.a., matrix Langevin distribution or chordal distance) for isotropic rotational uncertainty. However, another common way to represent uncertainty for rotations and poses is to define anisotropic noise in the associated Lie algebra. Starting from a noise model based on the Cayley map, we define our estimation problems, convert them to Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Programs (QCQPs), then relax them to Semidefinite Programs (SDPs), which can be solved using standard interior-point optimization methods; global optimality follows from Lagrangian strong duality. We first show how to carry out basic rotation and pose averaging. We then turn to the more complex problem of trajectory estimation, which involves many pose variables with both individual and inter-pose measurements (or motion priors). Our contribution is to formulate SDP relaxations for all these problems based on the Cayley map (including the identification of redundant constraints) and to show them working in practical settings. We hope our results can add to the catalogue of useful estimation problems whose solutions can be <i>a posteriori</i> guaranteed to be globally optimal.</p>","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"44 3","pages":"366-387"},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11903194/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143652065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Decentralized state estimation: An approach using pseudomeasurements and preintegration.","authors":"Charles Champagne Cossette, Mohammed Ayman Shalaby, David Saussié, James Richard Forbes","doi":"10.1177/02783649241230993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649241230993","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper addresses the problem of decentralized, collaborative state estimation in robotic teams. In particular, this paper considers problems where individual robots estimate similar physical quantities, such as each other's position relative to themselves. The use of <i>pseudomeasurements</i> is introduced as a means of modeling such relationships between robots' state estimates and is shown to be a tractable way to approach the decentralized state estimation problem. Moreover, this formulation easily leads to a general-purpose observability test that simultaneously accounts for measurements that robots collect from their own sensors, as well as the communication structure within the team. Finally, input preintegration is proposed as a communication-efficient way of sharing odometry information between robots, and the entire theory is appropriate for both vector-space and Lie-group state definitions. To overcome the need for communicating preintegrated covariance information, a deep autoencoder is proposed that reconstructs the covariance information from the inputs, hence further reducing the communication requirements. The proposed framework is evaluated on three different simulated problems, and one experiment involving three quadcopters.</p>","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"43 10","pages":"1573-1593"},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2024-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11455620/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142395423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Linear electrostatic actuators with Moiré-effect optical proprioceptive sensing and electroadhesive braking","authors":"Inrak Choi, Sohee John Yoon, Yong-Lae Park","doi":"10.1177/02783649231210593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649231210593","url":null,"abstract":"Muscles in animals and actuation systems in advanced robots consist not of the actuation component alone; the motive, dissipative, and proprioceptive components exist in a complete set to achieve versatile and precise manipulation tasks. We present such a system as a linear electrostatic actuator package incorporated with sensing and braking components. Our modular actuator design is composed of these actuator films and a dielectric fluid, and we examine the performance of the proposed system both theoretically and experimentally. In addition, we introduce a mechanism of optical proprioceptive sensing utilizing the Moiré pattern innately generated on the actuator surface, which allows high-resolution reading of the position of the actuator without noise. The optical sensor is also capable of measuring the force exerted by the actuator. Lastly, we add an electroadhesive brake in the package in parallel with the actuator, introducing a method of mode switching that utilizes all three components and presenting control demonstrations with a robot arm. Our actuation system is compact and flexible and can be easily integrated with various robotic applications.","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"46 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134900916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Under-canopy dataset for advancing simultaneous localization and mapping in agricultural robotics","authors":"Jose Cuaran, Andres Eduardo Baquero Velasquez, Mateus Valverde Gasparino, Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Arun Narenthiran Sivakumar, Justin Wasserman, Muhammad Huzaifa, Sarita Adve, Girish Chowdhary","doi":"10.1177/02783649231215372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649231215372","url":null,"abstract":"Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has been an active research problem over recent decades. Many leading solutions are available that can achieve remarkable performance in environments with familiar structure, such as indoors and cities. However, our work shows that these leading systems fail in an agricultural setting, particularly in under the canopy navigation in the largest-in-acreage crops of the world: corn ( Zea mays) and soybean ( Glycine max). The presence of plenty of visual clutter due to leaves, varying illumination, and stark visual similarity makes these environments lose the familiar structure on which SLAM algorithms rely on. To advance SLAM in such unstructured agricultural environments, we present a comprehensive agricultural dataset. Our open dataset consists of stereo images, IMUs, wheel encoders, and GPS measurements continuously recorded from a mobile robot in corn and soybean fields across different growth stages. In addition, we present best-case benchmark results for several leading visual-inertial odometry and SLAM systems. Our data and benchmark clearly show that there is significant research promise in SLAM for agricultural settings. The dataset is available online at: https://github.com/jrcuaranv/terrasentia-dataset .","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"87 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135091453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Multilevel motion planning: A fiber bundle formulation","authors":"Andreas Orthey, Sohaib Akbar, Marc Toussaint","doi":"10.1177/02783649231209337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649231209337","url":null,"abstract":"High-dimensional motion planning problems can often be solved significantly faster by using multilevel abstractions. While there are various ways to formally capture multilevel abstractions, we formulate them in terms of fiber bundles. Fiber bundles essentially describe lower-dimensional projections of the state space using local product spaces, which allows us to concisely describe and derive novel algorithms in terms of bundle restrictions and bundle sections. Given such a structure and a corresponding admissible constraint function, we develop highly efficient and asymptotically optimal sampling-based motion planning methods for high-dimensional state spaces. Those methods exploit the structure of fiber bundles through the use of bundle primitives. Those primitives are used to create novel bundle planners, the rapidly-exploring quotient space trees (QRRT*), and the quotient space roadmap planner (QMP*). Both planners are shown to be probabilistically complete and almost-surely asymptotically optimal. To evaluate our bundle planners, we compare them against classical sampling-based planners on benchmarks of four low-dimensional scenarios, and eight high-dimensional scenarios, ranging from 21 to 100 degrees of freedom, including multiple robots and nonholonomic constraints. Our findings show improvements up to two to six orders of magnitude and underline the efficiency of multilevel motion planners and the benefit of exploiting multilevel abstractions using the terminology of fiber bundles.","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":" 34","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135191688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"TRansPose: Large-scale multispectral dataset for transparent object","authors":"Jeongyun Kim, Myung-Hwan Jeon, Sangwoo Jung, Wooseong Yang, Minwoo Jung, Jaeho Shin, Ayoung Kim","doi":"10.1177/02783649231213117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649231213117","url":null,"abstract":"Transparent objects are encountered frequently in our daily lives, yet recognizing them poses challenges for conventional vision sensors due to their unique material properties, not being well perceived from RGB or depth cameras. Overcoming this limitation, thermal infrared cameras have emerged as a solution, offering improved visibility and shape information for transparent objects. In this paper, we present TRansPose, the first large-scale multispectral dataset that combines stereo RGB-D, thermal infrared (TIR) images, and object poses to promote transparent object research. The dataset includes 99 transparent objects, encompassing 43 household items, 27 recyclable trashes, 29 chemical laboratory equivalents, and 12 non-transparent objects. It comprises a vast collection of 333,819 images and 4,000,056 annotations, providing instance-level segmentation masks, ground-truth poses, and completed depth information. The data was acquired using an FLIR A65 thermal infrared camera, two Intel RealSense L515 RGB-D cameras, and a Franka Emika Panda robot manipulator. Spanning 87 sequences, TRansPose covers various challenging real-life scenarios, including objects filled with water, diverse lighting conditions, heavy clutter, non-transparent or translucent containers, objects in plastic bags, and multi-stacked objects. Supplementary material can be accessed from the following link: https://sites.google.com/view/transpose-dataset .","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":" 44","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135240935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trajectory generation and tracking control for aggressive tail-sitter flights","authors":"Guozheng Lu, Yixi Cai, Nan Chen, Fanze Kong, Yunfan Ren, Fu Zhang","doi":"10.1177/02783649231207655","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649231207655","url":null,"abstract":"We address the theoretical and practical problems related to the trajectory generation and tracking control of tail-sitter UAVs. Theoretically, we focus on the differential flatness property with full exploitation of actual UAV aerodynamic models, which lays a foundation for generating dynamically feasible trajectory and achieving high-performance tracking control. We have found that a tail-sitter is differentially flat with accurate (not simplified) aerodynamic models within the entire flight envelope, by specifying coordinate flight condition and choosing the vehicle position as the flat output. This fundamental property allows us to fully exploit the high-fidelity aerodynamic models in the trajectory planning and tracking control to achieve accurate tail-sitter flights. Particularly, an optimization-based trajectory planner for tail-sitters is proposed to design high-quality, smooth trajectories with consideration of kinodynamic constraints, singularity-free constraints, and actuator saturation. The planned trajectory of flat output is transformed into state trajectory in real time with optional consideration of wind in environments. To track the state trajectory, a global, singularity-free, and minimally parameterized on-manifold MPC is developed, which fully leverages the accurate aerodynamic model to achieve high-accuracy trajectory tracking within the whole flight envelope. The proposed algorithms are implemented on our quadrotor tail-sitter prototype, “Hong Hu,” and their effectiveness are demonstrated through extensive real-world experiments in both indoor and outdoor field tests, including agile SE(3) flight through consecutive narrow windows requiring specific attitude and with speed up to 10 m/s, typical tail-sitter maneuvers (transition, level flight, and loiter) with speed up to 20 m/s, and extremely aggressive aerobatic maneuvers (Wingover, Loop, Vertical Eight, and Cuban Eight) with acceleration up to 2.5 g. The video demonstration is available at https://youtu.be/2x_bLbVuyrk .","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"78 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135539835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Optimal virtual tube planning and control for swarm robotics","authors":"Pengda Mao, Rao Fu, Quan Quan","doi":"10.1177/02783649231210012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649231210012","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a novel method for efficiently solving a trajectory planning problem for swarm robotics in cluttered environments. Recent research has demonstrated high success rates in real-time local trajectory planning for swarm robotics in cluttered environments, but optimizing trajectories for each robot is still computationally expensive, with a computational complexity from [Formula: see text] to [Formula: see text] where [Formula: see text] is the number of parameters in the parameterized trajectory, [Formula: see text] is precision, and [Formula: see text] is the number of iterations with respect to [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. Furthermore, the swarm is difficult to move as a group. To address this issue, we define and then construct the optimal virtual tube, which includes infinite optimal trajectories. Under certain conditions, any optimal trajectory in the optimal virtual tube can be expressed as a convex combination of a finite number of optimal trajectories, with a computational complexity of [Formula: see text]. Afterward, a hierarchical approach including a planning method of the optimal virtual tube with minimizing energy and distributed model predictive control is proposed. In simulations and experiments, the proposed approach is validated and its effectiveness over other methods is demonstrated through comparison.","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"293 9","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135474810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}