Robotics and Biomimetics

https://link.springer.com/journal/40638

List of Papers (Total 84)

Systematic engineering design helps creating new soft machines

Soft robotics is an emerging field in the robotics community which deals with completely new types of robots. However, often new soft robotic designs depend on the ingenuity of the engineer rather being systematically derived. For this reason, in order to support the engineer in the design process, we present a design methodology for general technical systems in this paper and...

Hybrid control combined with a voluntary biosignal to control a prosthetic hand

In this research, the combination of fuzzy/PD and EMG signals, as direct command control, is proposed. Although fuzzy/PD strategy was used to control force position of the artificial hand, the combination of that with EMG signaling to voluntary direct command control is a novel method. In this paper, the EMG signal and its role in effective communication between a DC motor with a...

A 6-DOF robot-time optimal trajectory planning based on an improved genetic algorithm

By using quintic polynomial function to interpolate several given points of each joint of the robot, the mathematical expressions of each joint variable of the robot with time are established. In addition, to improve the search algorithm performance crossover operator and mutation operator of the genetic algorithm are improved in cosine form. Furthermore, the improved adaptive...

A multi-jointed underactuated robot hand with fluid-driven stretchable tubes

Inspired from flexible bending of octopus’ tentacles and outside-driving kind of traditional exoskeletons, this paper proposed a novel self-adaptive underactuated finger mechanism, called OS finger. OS finger is similar to an octopus’ tentacle and consists of an artificial muscle which is through all joints and driven by fluid, eight serial-hinged joints, and force-changeable...

Design of a novel wheeled tensegrity robot: a comparison of tensegrity concepts and a prototype for travelling air ducts

Efforts in the research of tensegrity structures applied to mobile robots have recently been focused on a purely tensegrity solution to all design requirements. Locomotion systems based on tensegrity structures are currently slow and complex to control. Although wheeled locomotion provides better efficiency over distances there is no literature available on the value of wheeled...

Dynamic modelling and natural characteristic analysis of cycloid ball transmission using lumped stiffness method

The vibration of robot joint reducer is the main factor that causes vibration or motion error of robot system. To improve the dynamic precision of robot system, the cycloid ball transmission used in robot joint is selected as study object in this paper. An efficient dynamic modelling method is presented—lumped stiffness method. Based on lumped stiffness method, a translational...

A novel cluster-tube self-adaptive robot hand

This paper proposes a novel cluster-tube self-adaptive robot hand (CTSA Hand). The CTSA Hand consists of a base, a motor, a transmission mechanism, multiple elastic tendons, and a group of sliding-tube assemblies. Each sliding-tube assembly is composed of a sliding tube, a guide rod, two springs and a hinge. When the hand grasping an object, the object pushes some sliding tubes...

A novel inspection robot for nuclear station steam generator secondary side with self-localization

Nuclear energy is one of the most important clean energy on earth presently. The steam generator secondary side is the key device of nuclear power station. As an important branch of special robot, nuclear robot is the most convenient and effective mean to inspect the steam generator. This paper describes one robot system which could help users inspecting tubes and locating the...

A review on robotic fish enabled by ionic polymer–metal composite artificial muscles

A novel actuating material, which is lightweight, soft, and capable of generating large flapping motion under electrical stimuli, is highly desirable to build energy-efficient and maneuverable bio-inspired underwater robots. Ionic polymer–metal composites are important category of electroactive polymers, since they can generate large bending motions under low actuation voltages...

Route bundling in polygonal domains using Differential Evolution

Route bundling implies compounding multiple routes in a way that anchoring points at intermediate locations minimize a global distance metric to obtain a tree-like structure where the roots of the tree (anchoring points) serve as coordinating locus for the joint transport of information, goods and people. Route bundling is a relevant conceptual construct in a number of path...

Improved 3D measurement with a novel preprocessing method in DFP

Shadow and background are two common factors in digital fringe projection, which lead to ambiguity in three-dimensional measurement and thereby need to be seriously considered. Preprocessing is often needed to segment the object from invalid points. The existing segmentation approaches based on modulation normally perform well in pure dark background circumstances, which, however...

Characterizing dynamic behaviors of three-particle paramagnetic microswimmer near a solid surface

Particle-based magnetically actuated microswimmers have the potential to act as microrobotic tools for biomedical applications. In this paper, we report the dynamic behaviors of a three-particle paramagnetic microswimmer. Actuated by a rotating magnetic field with different frequencies, the microswimmer exhibits simple rotation and propulsion. When the input frequency is below 8...

Ethical framework of assistive devices: review and reflection

The population of ageing is growing significantly over the world, and there is an emerging demand for better healthcare services and more care centres. Innovations of Information and Communication Technology has resulted in development of various types of assistive robots to fulfil elderly’s needs and independency, whilst carrying out daily routine tasks. This makes it vital to...

A tracked robot with novel bio-inspired passive “legs”

For track-based robots, an important aspect is the suppression design, which determines the trafficability and comfort of the whole system. The trafficability limits the robot’s working capability, and the riding comfort limits the robot’s working effectiveness, especially with some sensitive instruments mounted on or operated. To these aims, a track-based robot equipped with a...

Dynamics and control of separable coupled rigid body systems

This paper explores the dynamics of separable coupled rigid body systems, a special class of constrained rigid body systems. These are defined as two systems that interact with each other by forces of contact, resulting in a reduction in dimensionality and complexity. The mechanics and consequences of this reduction are investigated here. The basic hypothesis and an example of...

Improving low-cost inertial-measurement-unit (IMU)-based motion tracking accuracy for a biomorphic hyper-redundant snake robot

This paper develops and experimentally validates a 3D-printed snake robot prototype. Its structure is designed to allocate limited room for each functional module (including an external power module, battery power module, the wireless control and transmission module and some detective sensors), so as to ensure the snake robot works in different environments. In order to control...

Aerial pruning mechanism, initial real environment test

In this research, a pruning mechanism for aerial pruning tasks is tested in a real environment. Since the final goal of the aerial pruning robot will be to prune tree branches close to power lines, some experiments related to wireless communication and pruning performance were conducted. The experiments consisted of testing the communication between two XBee RF modules for...

Robot-aided electrospinning toward intelligent biomedical engineering

The rapid development of robotics offers new opportunities for the traditional biofabrication in higher accuracy and controllability, which provides great potentials for the intelligent biomedical engineering. This paper reviews the state of the art of robotics in a widely used biomaterial fabrication process, i.e., electrospinning, including its working principle, main...

Grasping state estimation of printable soft gripper using electro-conductive yarn

Automatic handling of many types of food materials are required to realize the automation of production of commercially prepared box lunches. A printable soft gripper was developed for food handling which is simple to produce with a 3D printer. However, the sensing ability of the printable soft gripper was not discussed in previous research. In this paper, a novel method for...

Accuracy to detection timing for assisting repetitive facilitation exercise system using MRCP and SVM

This paper presents a feasibility study of a brain–machine interface system to assist repetitive facilitation exercise. Repetitive facilitation exercise is an effective rehabilitation method for patients with hemiplegia. In repetitive facilitation exercise, a therapist stimulates the paralyzed part of the patient while motor commands run along the nerve pathway. However...

Studying slippage on pushing applications with snake robots

In this paper, a framework for analyzing the motion resulting from the interaction between a snake robot and an object is shown. Metrics are derived to study the motion of the object and robot, showing that the addition of passive wheels to the snake robot helps to minimize slippage. However, the passive wheels do not have a significant impact on the force exerted onto the object...

Comparison of different soft grippers for lunch box packaging

Automating the lunch box packaging is a challenging task due to the high deformability and large individual differences in shape and physical property of food materials. Soft robotic grippers showed potentials to perform such tasks. In this paper, we presented four pneumatic soft actuators made of different materials and different fabrication methods and compared their...

A comparison study of adaptive scale estimation in correlation filter-based visual tracking methods

Recently, discriminative correlation filter-based method becomes one of the popular directions in the field of visual tracking because of its computational efficiency and excellent performance, which make it especially suitable for real-time application. Most of them are focused only on the transition estimation. However, accurate scale estimation of the target plays a very...

A new multiple robot path planning algorithm: dynamic distributed particle swarm optimization

Multiple robot systems have become a major study concern in the field of robotic research. Their control becomes unreliable and even infeasible if the number of robots increases. In this paper, a new dynamic distributed particle swarm optimization (D2PSO) algorithm is proposed for trajectory path planning of multiple robots in order to find collision-free optimal path for each...

Vision-assisted micromanipulation using closed-loop actuation of multiple microrobots

Accurate control and precise positioning of opto-thermocapillary flow-addressed bubble microrobots are necessary for micromanipulation. In addition, micromanipulation using the simultaneous actuation of multiple microrobots requires a robust control system to enable independent motion. This paper demonstrates a hybrid closed-loop vision-assisted control system capable of...