No Arabic abstract
Deploying robots from isolated operations to shared environments has been an increasing trend in robotics for the last decades. However, the requirement of robust interaction in highly variable environments is still beyond the capability of most robots. We proposed to achieve robustness of various interactions by using the Fractal Impedance Control (FIC) and exploiting its non-linear stiffness to adapt to multiple cooperative scenarios, which is applicable to both manipulation and teleoperation applications. The proposed method was evaluated by a wide range of experiments: drilling, moving objects with unknown dynamics, and interacting with humans. The extensive validations demonstrated that the proposed method is very robust in presence of delays and reduced bandwidth in the communication link between master and follower. The results confirmed that the proposed method can enhance the robustness significantly and allow switching tasks freely between manipulation, human-robot cooperation and teleoperation without the need of extensive re-tuning of the controllers.
Robust dynamic interactions are required to move robots in daily environments alongside humans. Optimisation and learning methods have been used to mimic and reproduce human movements. However, they are often not robust and their generalisation is limited. This work proposed a hierarchical control architecture for robot manipulators and provided capabilities of reproducing human-like motions during unknown interaction dynamics. Our results show that the reproduced end-effector trajectories can preserve the main characteristics of the initial human motion recorded via a motion capture system, and are robust against external perturbations. The data indicate that some detailed movements are hard to reproduce due to the physical limits of the hardware that cannot reach the same velocity recorded in human movements. Nevertheless, these technical problems can be addressed by using better hardware and our proposed algorithms can still be applied to produce imitated motions.
Background: Multi-articulate prostheses are capable of performing dexterous hand movements. However, clinically available control strategies fail to provide users with intuitive, independent and proportional control over multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs) in real-time. New Method: We detail the use of a modified Kalman filter (MKF) to provide intuitive, independent and proportional control over six-DOF prostheses such as the DEKA LUKE Arm. Input features include neural firing rates recorded from Utah Slanted Electrode Arrays and mean absolute value of intramuscular electromyographic (EMG) recordings. Ad-hoc modifications include thresholds and non-unity gains on the output of a Kalman filter. Results: We demonstrate that both neural and EMG data can be combined effectively. We also highlight that modifications can be optimized to significantly improve performance relative to an unmodified Kalman filter. Thresholds significantly reduced unintended movement and promoted more independent control of the different DOFs. Gain were significantly greater than one and served to amplify participant effort. Optimal modifications can be determined quickly offline and translate to functional improvements online. Using a portable take-home system, participants performed various activities of daily living. Comparison with Existing Methods: In contrast to pattern recognition, the MKF allows users to continuously modulate their force output, which is critical for fine dexterity. The MKF is also computationally efficient and can be trained in less than five minutes. Conclusions: The MKF can be used to explore the functional and psychological benefits associated with long-term, at-home control of dexterous prosthetic hands.
Coordinated dual-arm manipulation tasks can be broadly characterized as possessing absolute and relative motion components. Relative motion tasks, in particular, are inherently redundant in the way they can be distributed between end-effectors. In this work, we analyse cooperative manipulation in terms of the asymmetric resolution of relative motion tasks. We discuss how existing approaches enable the asymmetric execution of a relative motion task, and show how an asymmetric relative motion space can be defined. We leverage this result to propose an extended relative Jacobian to model the cooperative system, which allows a user to set a concrete degree of asymmetry in the task execution. This is achieved without the need for prescribing an absolute motion target. Instead, the absolute motion remains available as a functional redundancy to the system. We illustrate the properties of our proposed Jacobian through numerical simulations of a novel differential Inverse Kinematics algorithm.
This paper presents a planner that can automatically find an optimal assembly sequence for a dual-arm robot to assemble the soma blocks. The planner uses the mesh model of objects and the final state of the assembly to generate all possible assembly sequence and evaluate the optimal assembly sequence by considering the stability, graspability, assemblability, as well as the need for a second arm. Especially, the need for a second arm is considered when supports from worktables and other workpieces are not enough to produce a stable assembly. The planner will refer to an assisting grasp to additionally hold and support the unstable components so that the robot can further assemble new workpieces and finally reach a stable state. The output of the planner is the optimal assembly orders, candidate grasps, assembly directions, and the assisting grasps if any. The output of the planner can be used to guide a dual-arm robot to perform the assembly task. The planner is verified in both simulations and real-world executions.
In teleoperation, research has mainly focused on target approaching, where we deal with the more challenging object manipulation task by advancing the shared control technique. Appropriately manipulating an object is challenging due to the fine motion constraint requirements for a specific manipulation task. Although these motion constraints are critical for task success, they often are subtle when observing ambiguous human motion. The disembodiment problem and physical discrepancy between the human and robot hands bring additional uncertainty, further exaggerating the complications of the object manipulation task. Moreover, there is a lack of planning and modeling techniques that can effectively combine the human and robot agents motion input while considering the ambiguity of the human intent. To overcome this challenge, we built a multi-task robot grasping model and developed an intent-uncertainty-aware grasp planner to generate robust grasp poses given the ambiguous human intent inference inputs. With these validated modeling and planning techniques, it is expected to extend teleoperated robots functionality and adoption in practical telemanipulation scenarios.