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Chapter 20 — Snake-Like and Continuum Robots

Ian D. Walker, Howie Choset and Gregory S. Chirikjian

This chapter provides an overview of the state of the art of snake-like (backbones comprised of many small links) and continuum (continuous backbone) robots. The history of each of these classes of robot is reviewed, focusing on key hardware developments. A review of the existing theory and algorithms for kinematics for both types of robot is presented, followed by a summary ofmodeling of locomotion for snake-like and continuum mechanisms.

RDP experimental results

Author  Nabil Simaan

Video ID : 247

Demonstrates a prototype system for transurethral bladder cancer resection. This robot has a 5 mm snake with two segments and three working channels including a custom-made fiberscope, laser ablation and a gripper [1-3]. References: [1] A. Bajo, R. B. Pickens, S. D. Herrell, N. Simaan: A pilot ex-vivo evaluation of a telerobotic system for transurethral intervention and surveillance, The 5th Hamlyn Symp. Medical Robotics (2012), pp. 3-4; [2] A. Bajo, R. B. Pickens, S. D. Herrell, N. Simaan: Constrained motion control of multisegment continuum robots for transurethral bladder resection and surveillance, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. (ICRA), Karlsruhe (2013), pp. 5817-5822; [3] R. E. Goldman, A. Bajo, L. S. MacLachlan, R. Pickens, S. D. Herrell, N. Simaan: Design and performance evaluation of a minimally invasive telerobotic platform for transurethral surveillance and intervention, IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. 60(4), 918-925 (2013)

Chapter 58 — Robotics in Hazardous Applications

James Trevelyan, William R. Hamel and Sung-Chul Kang

Robotics researchers have worked hard to realize a long-awaited vision: machines that can eliminate the need for people to work in hazardous environments. Chapter 60 is framed by the vision of disaster response: search and rescue robots carrying people from burning buildings or tunneling through collapsed rock falls to reach trapped miners. In this chapter we review tangible progress towards robots that perform routine work in places too dangerous for humans. Researchers still have many challenges ahead of them but there has been remarkable progress in some areas. Hazardous environments present special challenges for the accomplishment of desired tasks depending on the nature and magnitude of the hazards. Hazards may be present in the form of radiation, toxic contamination, falling objects or potential explosions. Technology that specialized engineering companies can develop and sell without active help from researchers marks the frontier of commercial feasibility. Just inside this border lie teleoperated robots for explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) and for underwater engineering work. Even with the typical tenfold disadvantage in manipulation performance imposed by the limits of today’s telepresence and teleoperation technology, in terms of human dexterity and speed, robots often can offer a more cost-effective solution. However, most routine applications in hazardous environments still lie far beyond the feasibility frontier. Fire fighting, remediating nuclear contamination, reactor decommissioning, tunneling, underwater engineering, underground mining and clearance of landmines and unexploded ordnance still present many unsolved problems.

DIGGER DTR Demining destroying anti-tank mines

Author  James P. Trevelyan

Video ID : 577

This is a Swiss-designed and built, remotely-controlled machine similar to Bozena, shown clearing vegetation. From the video, it seems to lack some of the versatility of Bozena. However, it is clearly able to continue working without being affected by powerful anti-tank mine explosions, even ones with shaped charges like the TMRP-1. Specifications include remote control, 8-ton weight, and deployment from a 20-ft standard shipping container.   The personnel protection shield provides only minimal protection. The more recent DIGGER D-3 ground-milling machine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P154EDpRFew) avoids many of the weaknesses of the flail machine used in the earlier model and incorporates a more robust design, and it also has dust and shrapnel protection.

Chapter 20 — Snake-Like and Continuum Robots

Ian D. Walker, Howie Choset and Gregory S. Chirikjian

This chapter provides an overview of the state of the art of snake-like (backbones comprised of many small links) and continuum (continuous backbone) robots. The history of each of these classes of robot is reviewed, focusing on key hardware developments. A review of the existing theory and algorithms for kinematics for both types of robot is presented, followed by a summary ofmodeling of locomotion for snake-like and continuum mechanisms.

Aiko obstacle-aided locomotion

Author  Pål Liljebäck

Video ID : 253

Video of Aiko snake robot developed at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)/SINTEF Advanced Robotics Laboratory. In this video the robot uses obstacles to propel itself.

Chapter 76 — Evolutionary Robotics

Stefano Nolfi, Josh Bongard, Phil Husbands and Dario Floreano

Evolutionary Robotics is a method for automatically generating artificial brains and morphologies of autonomous robots. This approach is useful both for investigating the design space of robotic applications and for testing scientific hypotheses of biological mechanisms and processes. In this chapter we provide an overview of methods and results of Evolutionary Robotics with robots of different shapes, dimensions, and operation features. We consider both simulated and physical robots with special consideration to the transfer between the two worlds.

Evolution of visually-guided behaviour on Sussex gantry robot

Author  Phil Husbands

Video ID : 371

Behaviour evolved in the real world on the Sussex gantry robot in 1994. Controllers (evolved neural networks plus visual sampling morphology) are automatically evaluated on the actual robot. The required behaviour is a shape discrimination task: to move to the triangle, while ignoring the rectangle, under very noisy lighting conditions.

Chapter 79 — Robotics for Education

David P. Miller and Illah Nourbakhsh

Educational robotics programs have become popular in most developed countries and are becoming more and more prevalent in the developing world as well. Robotics is used to teach problem solving, programming, design, physics, math and even music and art to students at all levels of their education. This chapter provides an overview of some of the major robotics programs along with the robot platforms and the programming environments commonly used. Like robot systems used in research, there is a constant development and upgrade of hardware and software – so this chapter provides a snapshot of the technologies being used at this time. The chapter concludes with a review of the assessment strategies that can be used to determine if a particular robotics program is benefitting students in the intended ways.

Autonomous aerial-vehicle, carrier-landing contest (2001)

Author  KIPR

Video ID : 633

KIPR's first aerial robot contest featuring several middle and high schools from Oklahoma and neighboring states. It was held at the University of Oklahoma's Rawl Engineering Practice Facility. Teams used AR drones and KIPR's CBC2 controller to program the drone and have the drone react autonomously. No human control was used. Four very different approaches are shown to the event, in which the teams programmed their robots to totry land on a moving platform.

Chapter 47 — Motion Planning and Obstacle Avoidance

Javier Minguez, Florant Lamiraux and Jean-Paul Laumond

This chapter describes motion planning and obstacle avoidance for mobile robots. We will see how the two areas do not share the same modeling background. From the very beginning of motion planning, research has been dominated by computer sciences. Researchers aim at devising well-grounded algorithms with well-understood completeness and exactness properties.

The challenge of this chapter is to present both nonholonomic motion planning (Sects. 47.1–47.6) and obstacle avoidance (Sects. 47.7–47.10) issues. Section 47.11 reviews recent successful approaches that tend to embrace the whole problemofmotion planning and motion control. These approaches benefit from both nonholonomic motion planning and obstacle avoidance methods.

Sensor-based trajectory deformation and docking for nonholonomic mobile robots

Author  Florent Lamiraux

Video ID : 80

This video demonstrates motion planning and reactive obstacle avoidance for nonholonomic robots. A mobile robot with a trailer is asked to park into a U-shaped obstacle. Motion planning is performed by a visibility-based PRM algorithm using a flatness-based steering method built on convex combinations of canonical curves. The planned trajectory is then followed by the robot while detecting obstacles using a laser scanner. The current trajectory is locally deformed in order to avoid obstacles and to end at the detected U-shaped obstacle.

Chapter 13 — Behavior-Based Systems

François Michaud and Monica Nicolescu

Nature is filled with examples of autonomous creatures capable of dealing with the diversity, unpredictability, and rapidly changing conditions of the real world. Such creatures must make decisions and take actions based on incomplete perception, time constraints, limited knowledge about the world, cognition, reasoning and physical capabilities, in uncontrolled conditions and with very limited cues about the intent of others. Consequently, one way of evaluating intelligence is based on the creature’s ability to make the most of what it has available to handle the complexities of the real world. The main objective of this chapter is to explain behavior-based systems and their use in autonomous control problems and applications. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 13.1 overviews robot control, introducing behavior-based systems in relation to other established approaches to robot control. Section 13.2 follows by outlining the basic principles of behavior-based systems that make them distinct from other types of robot control architectures. The concept of basis behaviors, the means of modularizing behavior-based systems, is presented in Sect. 13.3. Section 13.4 describes how behaviors are used as building blocks for creating representations for use by behavior-based systems, enabling the robot to reason about the world and about itself in that world. Section 13.5 presents several different classes of learning methods for behavior-based systems, validated on single-robot and multirobot systems. Section 13.6 provides an overview of various robotics problems and application domains that have successfully been addressed or are currently being studied with behavior-based control. Finally, Sect. 13.7 concludes the chapter.

Experience-based learning of high-level task representations: Reproduction

Author  Monica Nicolescu

Video ID : 28

This is a video recorded in early 2000s, showing a Pioneer robot visiting a number of targets in a certain order based on a demonstration provided by a human user. The robot training stage is also shown in a related video in this chapter. References: 1. M. Nicolescu, M.J. Mataric: Experience-based learning of task representations from human-robot interaction, Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. Comput. Intell. Robot. Autom. , Banff (2001), pp. 463-468; 2. M. Nicolescu, M.J. Mataric: Learning and interacting in human-robot domains, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybernet. A31(5), 419-430 (2001)

Chapter 17 — Limbed Systems

Shuuji Kajita and Christian Ott

A limbed system is a mobile robot with a body, legs and arms. First, its general design process is discussed in Sect. 17.1. Then we consider issues of conceptual design and observe designs of various existing robots in Sect. 17.2. As an example in detail, the design of a humanoid robot HRP-4C is shown in Sect. 17.3. To design a limbed system of good performance, it is important to take into account of actuation and control, like gravity compensation, limit cycle dynamics, template models, and backdrivable actuation. These are discussed in Sect. 17.4.

In Sect. 17.5, we overview divergence of limbed systems. We see odd legged walkers, leg–wheel hybrid robots, leg–arm hybrid robots, tethered walking robots, and wall-climbing robots. To compare limbed systems of different configurations,we can use performance indices such as the gait sensitivity norm, the Froude number, and the specific resistance, etc., which are introduced in Sect. 17.6.

Linear inverted pendulum mode

Author  Shuuji Kajita

Video ID : 512

Demonstration of the linear inverted pendulum mode (LIPM) and its application for biped walking control. This biped robot with parallel link legs was developed by Dr. Kajita and Dr. Tani.

Chapter 9 — Force Control

Luigi Villani and Joris De Schutter

A fundamental requirement for the success of a manipulation task is the capability to handle the physical contact between a robot and the environment. Pure motion control turns out to be inadequate because the unavoidable modeling errors and uncertainties may cause a rise of the contact force, ultimately leading to an unstable behavior during the interaction, especially in the presence of rigid environments. Force feedback and force control becomes mandatory to achieve a robust and versatile behavior of a robotic system in poorly structured environments as well as safe and dependable operation in the presence of humans. This chapter starts from the analysis of indirect force control strategies, conceived to keep the contact forces limited by ensuring a suitable compliant behavior to the end effector, without requiring an accurate model of the environment. Then the problem of interaction tasks modeling is analyzed, considering both the case of a rigid environment and the case of a compliant environment. For the specification of an interaction task, natural constraints set by the task geometry and artificial constraints set by the control strategy are established, with respect to suitable task frames. This formulation is the essential premise to the synthesis of hybrid force/motion control schemes.

Recent research in impedance ontrol

Author  Unknown, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland

Video ID : 684

Experimentacl research on impedance control done in 1991 at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The demonstrations involve three scenarios: stiffness control without force sensing; impedance control based on a wrist force sensor; and impedance control based on joint torque sensing. This work was published in the ICRA 1991 video proceedings.

Chapter 70 — Human-Robot Augmentation

Massimo Bergamasco and Hugh Herr

The development of robotic systems capable of sharing with humans the load of heavy tasks has been one of the primary objectives in robotics research. At present, in order to fulfil such an objective, a strong interest in the robotics community is collected by the so-called wearable robots, a class of robotics systems that are worn and directly controlled by the human operator. Wearable robots, together with powered orthoses that exploit robotic components and control strategies, can represent an immediate resource also for allowing humans to restore manipulation and/or walking functionalities.

The present chapter deals with wearable robotics systems capable of providing different levels of functional and/or operational augmentation to the human beings for specific functions or tasks. Prostheses, powered orthoses, and exoskeletons are described for upper limb, lower limb, and whole body structures. State-of-theart devices together with their functionalities and main components are presented for each class of wearable system. Critical design issues and open research aspects are reported.

Arm-Exos

Author  Massimo Bergamasco

Video ID : 148

The video details the Arm-Exos and, in particular, its capability for tracking the operator's motions and for rendering the contact forces in a simple, demonstrative, virtual environment.