Search results for " Robotics"
showing 10 items of 118 documents
ROAD project: Robotics for assisted diving
2014
The activities associated to underwater diving are of great importance in many areas. In the second half of the last century, diving technologies have greatly progressed, but diving is still characterized by significant risks, especially for professional divers who works at high depth, and limited practicability. The use of robotic systems and automatic procedures would allow, as in other situations where safety is of concern (for example, in case of hazardous works or in relation to hostile environments), a reliable monitoring and assessment of the physiological conditions of human operators during their activities. Moving from currently available technologies in underwater robotics, the R…
A New HLA-Based Distributed Control Architecture for Agricultural Teams of Robots in Hybrid Applications with Real and Simulated Devices or Environme…
2011
The control architecture is one of the most important part of agricultural robotics and other robotic systems. Furthermore its importance increases when the system involves a group of heterogeneous robots that should cooperate to achieve a global goal. A new control architecture is introduced in this paper for groups of robots in charge of doing maintenance tasks in agricultural environments. Some important features such as scalability, code reuse, hardware abstraction and data distribution have been considered in the design of the new architecture. Furthermore, coordination and cooperation among the different elements in the system is allowed in the proposed control system. By integrating …
Assistive robotic walker parameter identification for estimation of human thrust without force sensors
2017
In this paper we propose a parameter identification procedure for the wheel-motor dynamic of a robotic walker, i.e. a commercial trolley for elderly people endowed with cognitive, sensing and guidance capabilities. The objective of the wheel-motor dynamic model is to generate a suitable time reference to be used in an estimation algorithm. The ultimate goal of the estimation algorithm is to retrieve the thrust, i.e. torque and force, that the older adult user of the robotic walker applies to the platform. These quantities are of paramount importance in order to adopt intelligent and comfortable walker guidance algorithms. The novelty of this approach is the avoidance of additional costly se…
Social networks and robot companions: Technology, ethics, and science fiction
2019
Information technologies have become part of our everyday lives and are increasingly acting as intermediaries in our workplaces and personal relationships or even substituting them. This growing interaction with machines poses several questions about which we have no previous experience, nor can we reliably predict how they will influence the evolution of society. This has led to the convergence of technoscience and humanities in an ethical debate that is starting to bear fruit, not only with the setting of regulations and standards, but also with educational initiatives in university teaching, professional improvement, and the conformation of public opinion. Interestingly, science fiction …
Compensation of compliance errors in parallel manipulators composed of non-perfect kinematic chains
2012
The paper is devoted to the compliance errors compensation for parallel manipulators under external loading. Proposed approach is based on the non-linear stiffness modeling and reduces to a proper adjusting of a target trajectory. In contrast to previous works, in addition to compliance errors caused by machining forces, the problem of assembling errors caused by inaccuracy in the kinematic chains is considered. The advantages and practical significance of the proposed approach are illustrated by examples that deal with groove milling with Orthoglide manipulator.
Distributed and proximity-constrained C-means for discrete coverage control
2018
In this paper we present a novel distributed coverage control framework for a network of mobile agents, in charge of covering a finite set of points of interest (PoI), such as people in danger, geographically dispersed equipment or environmental landmarks. The proposed algorithm is inspired by C-Means, an unsupervised learning algorithm originally proposed for non-exclusive clustering and for identification of cluster centroids from a set of observations. To cope with the agents' limited sensing range and avoid infeasible coverage solutions, traditional C-Means needs to be enhanced with proximity constraints, ensuring that each agent takes into account only neighboring PoIs. The proposed co…
Compliance error compensation technique for parallel robots composed of non-perfect serial chains
2012
The paper presents the compliance errors compensation technique for over-constrained parallel manipulators under external and internal loadings. This technique is based on the non-linear stiffness modeling which is able to take into account the influence of non-perfect geometry of serial chains caused by manufacturing errors. Within the developed technique, the deviation compensation reduces to an adjustment of a target trajectory that is modified in the off-line mode. The advantages and practical significance of the proposed technique are illustrated by an example that deals with groove milling by the Orthoglide manipulator that considers different locations of the workpiece. It is also de…
Using Hankel matrices for dynamics-based facial emotion recognition and pain detection
2015
This paper proposes a new approach to model the temporal dynamics of a sequence of facial expressions. To this purpose, a sequence of Face Image Descriptors (FID) is regarded as the output of a Linear Time Invariant (LTI) system. The temporal dynamics of such sequence of descriptors are represented by means of a Hankel matrix. The paper presents different strategies to compute dynamics-based representation of a sequence of FID, and reports classification accuracy values of the proposed representations within different standard classification frameworks. The representations have been validated in two very challenging application domains: emotion recognition and pain detection. Experiments on…
Ensemble of Hankel Matrices for Face Emotion Recognition
2015
In this paper, a face emotion is considered as the result of the composition of multiple concurrent signals, each corresponding to the movements of a specific facial muscle. These concurrent signals are represented by means of a set of multi-scale appearance features that might be correlated with one or more concurrent signals. The extraction of these appearance features from a sequence of face images yields to a set of time series. This paper proposes to use the dynamics regulating each appearance feature time series to recognize among different face emotions. To this purpose, an ensemble of Hankel matrices corresponding to the extracted time series is used for emotion classification withi…
Safety assurance of an industrial robotic control system using hardware/software co-verification
2022
As a general trend in industrial robotics, an increasing number of safety functions are being developed or re-engineered to be handled in software rather than by physical hardware such as safety relays or interlock circuits. This trend reinforces the importance of supplementing traditional, input-based testing and quality procedures which are widely used in industry today, with formal verification and model-checking methods. To this end, this paper focuses on a representative safety-critical system in an ABB industrial paint robot, namely the High-Voltage electrostatic Control system (HVC). The practical convergence of the high-voltage produced by the HVC, essential for safe operation, is f…