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Chapter 40 — Mobility and Manipulation

Oliver Brock, Jaeheung Park and Marc Toussaint

Mobile manipulation requires the integration of methodologies from all aspects of robotics. Instead of tackling each aspect in isolation,mobilemanipulation research exploits their interdependence to solve challenging problems. As a result, novel views of long-standing problems emerge. In this chapter, we present these emerging views in the areas of grasping, control, motion generation, learning, and perception. All of these areas must address the shared challenges of high-dimensionality, uncertainty, and task variability. The section on grasping and manipulation describes a trend towards actively leveraging contact and physical and dynamic interactions between hand, object, and environment. Research in control addresses the challenges of appropriately coupling mobility and manipulation. The field of motion generation increasingly blurs the boundaries between control and planning, leading to task-consistent motion in high-dimensional configuration spaces, even in dynamic and partially unknown environments. A key challenge of learning formobilemanipulation consists of identifying the appropriate priors, and we survey recent learning approaches to perception, grasping, motion, and manipulation. Finally, a discussion of promising methods in perception shows how concepts and methods from navigation and active perception are applied.

Yale Aerial Manipulator - Dollar Grasp Lab

Author  Paul E. I. Pounds, Daniel R. Bersak, Aaron M. Dollar

Video ID : 656

Aaron Dollar's Aerial Manipulator integrates a gripper that is able to directly grasp and transport objects.

Chapter 67 — Humanoids

Paul Fitzpatrick, Kensuke Harada, Charles C. Kemp, Yoshio Matsumoto, Kazuhito Yokoi and Eiichi Yoshida

Humanoid robots selectively immitate aspects of human form and behavior. Humanoids come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from complete human-size legged robots to isolated robotic heads with human-like sensing and expression. This chapter highlights significant humanoid platforms and achievements, and discusses some of the underlying goals behind this area of robotics. Humanoids tend to require the integration ofmany of the methods covered in detail within other chapters of this handbook, so this chapter focuses on distinctive aspects of humanoid robotics with liberal cross-referencing.

This chapter examines what motivates researchers to pursue humanoid robotics, and provides a taste of the evolution of this field over time. It summarizes work on legged humanoid locomotion, whole-body activities, and approaches to human–robot communication. It concludes with a brief discussion of factors that may influence the future of humanoid robots.

Whole-body "pivoting" manipulation

Author  Eiichi Yoshida

Video ID : 595

The humanoid robot performs "pivoting" manipulation to carry a bulky object without lifting. A coarse path of the object towards its goal position is first planned to compute the trajectory of the hands which perform the manipulation. Then foot positions are determined along the object path, from which the COM trajectory is derived using the dynamic walking-pattern generator. Those tasks are provided to the inverse kinematics to generate the coordinated arm and leg motion for this complex manipulation. The second video shows the motion planning combining pivoting manipulation and free walking motion in a more complex environment.

Chapter 40 — Mobility and Manipulation

Oliver Brock, Jaeheung Park and Marc Toussaint

Mobile manipulation requires the integration of methodologies from all aspects of robotics. Instead of tackling each aspect in isolation,mobilemanipulation research exploits their interdependence to solve challenging problems. As a result, novel views of long-standing problems emerge. In this chapter, we present these emerging views in the areas of grasping, control, motion generation, learning, and perception. All of these areas must address the shared challenges of high-dimensionality, uncertainty, and task variability. The section on grasping and manipulation describes a trend towards actively leveraging contact and physical and dynamic interactions between hand, object, and environment. Research in control addresses the challenges of appropriately coupling mobility and manipulation. The field of motion generation increasingly blurs the boundaries between control and planning, leading to task-consistent motion in high-dimensional configuration spaces, even in dynamic and partially unknown environments. A key challenge of learning formobilemanipulation consists of identifying the appropriate priors, and we survey recent learning approaches to perception, grasping, motion, and manipulation. Finally, a discussion of promising methods in perception shows how concepts and methods from navigation and active perception are applied.

Extracting kinematic background knowledge from interactions using task-sensitive, relational learning

Author  Sebastian Hofer, Tobias Lang, Oliver Brock

Video ID : 671

To successfully manipulate novel objects, robots must first acquire information about the objects' kinematic structure. We present a method to learn relational, kinematic, background knowledge from exploratory interactions with the world. As the robot gathers experience, this background knowledge enables the acquisition of kinematic world models with increasing efficiency. Learning such background knowledge, however, proves difficult, especially in complex, feature-rich domains. We present a novel, task-sensitive, relational-rule learner and demonstrate that it is able to learn accurate kinematic background knowledge in domains where other approaches fail. The resulting background knowledge is more compact and generalizes better than that obtained with existing approaches.

Chapter 69 — Physical Human-Robot Interaction

Sami Haddadin and Elizabeth Croft

Over the last two decades, the foundations for physical human–robot interaction (pHRI) have evolved from successful developments in mechatronics, control, and planning, leading toward safer lightweight robot designs and interaction control schemes that advance beyond the current capacities of existing high-payload and highprecision position-controlled industrial robots. Based on their ability to sense physical interaction, render compliant behavior along the robot structure, plan motions that respect human preferences, and generate interaction plans for collaboration and coaction with humans, these novel robots have opened up novel and unforeseen application domains, and have advanced the field of human safety in robotics.

This chapter gives an overview on the state of the art in pHRI as of the date of publication. First, the advances in human safety are outlined, addressing topics in human injury analysis in robotics and safety standards for pHRI. Then, the foundations of human-friendly robot design, including the development of lightweight and intrinsically flexible force/torque-controlled machines together with the required perception abilities for interaction are introduced. Subsequently, motionplanning techniques for human environments, including the domains of biomechanically safe, risk-metric-based, human-aware planning are covered. Finally, the rather recent problem of interaction planning is summarized, including the issues of collaborative action planning, the definition of the interaction planning problem, and an introduction to robot reflexes and reactive control architecture for pHRI.

Human-robot handover

Author  Wesley P. Chan, Chris A. Parker, H.F.Machiel Van der Loos, Elizabeth A. Croft

Video ID : 716

In this video, we present a novel controller for safe, efficient, and intuitive robot-to-human object handovers. The controller enables a robot to mimic human behavior by actively regulating the applied grip force according to the measured load force during a handover. We provide an implementation of the controller on a Willow Garage PR2 robot, demonstrating the feasibility of realizing our design on robots with basic sensor/actuator capabilities.

Collaborative human-focused robotics for manufacturing

Author  CHARM Project Consortium

Video ID : 717

The CHARM project demonstrates methods for interacting with robotic assistants through developments in the perception, communication, control, and safe interaction technologies and techniques centered on supporting workers performing complex manufacturing tasks.

Chapter 23 — Biomimetic Robots

Kyu-Jin Cho and Robert Wood

Biomimetic robot designs attempt to translate biological principles into engineered systems, replacing more classical engineering solutions in order to achieve a function observed in the natural system. This chapter will focus on mechanism design for bio-inspired robots that replicate key principles from nature with novel engineering solutions. The challenges of biomimetic design include developing a deep understanding of the relevant natural system and translating this understanding into engineering design rules. This often entails the development of novel fabrication and actuation to realize the biomimetic design.

This chapter consists of four sections. In Sect. 23.1, we will define what biomimetic design entails, and contrast biomimetic robots with bio-inspired robots. In Sect. 23.2, we will discuss the fundamental components for developing a biomimetic robot. In Sect. 23.3, we will review detailed biomimetic designs that have been developed for canonical robot locomotion behaviors including flapping-wing flight, jumping, crawling, wall climbing, and swimming. In Sect. 23.4, we will discuss the enabling technologies for these biomimetic designs including material and fabrication.

Flytrap-inspired bi-stable gripper

Author  Seung-Won Kim, Kyu-Jin Cho

Video ID : 410

By using carbon-fiber, reinforced prepreg (CFRP) laminate as a leaf-and-shape memory alloy (SMA) spring actuator, we developed a novel bio-inspired flytrap robot.

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.

Evolved walking in octopod

Author  Phil Husbands

Video ID : 372

Evolved-walking behaviors on an octopod robot. Multiple gaits and obstacle avoidance can be observed. The behavior was evolved in a minimal simulation by Nick Jakobi at Sussex University and is successfully transferred to the real world as is evident from the video.

Chapter 25 — Underwater Robots

Hyun-Taek Choi and Junku Yuh

Covering about two-thirds of the earth, the ocean is an enormous system that dominates processes on the Earth and has abundant living and nonliving resources, such as fish and subsea gas and oil. Therefore, it has a great effect on our lives on land, and the importance of the ocean for the future existence of all human beings cannot be overemphasized. However, we have not been able to explore the full depths of the ocean and do not fully understand the complex processes of the ocean. Having said that, underwater robots including remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have received much attention since they can be an effective tool to explore the ocean and efficiently utilize the ocean resources. This chapter focuses on design issues of underwater robots including major subsystems such as mechanical systems, power sources, actuators and sensors, computers and communications, software architecture, and manipulators while Chap. 51 covers modeling and control of underwater robots.

Preliminary experimental result of the ROV iTurtle

Author  Hyun-Taek Choi

Video ID : 797

This video shows the preliminary experimental result of an underwater robot named iTurtle developed by KRISO (Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering). iTurtle is especially designed for underwater-structure inspection as an observation class ROV. It has dimming and direction controllable LED and halogen lights and a HD underwater camera, all of which are positioned by four horizontal thrusters. More importantly, its system software architecture is implemented using the structure explained in Fig. 25.7. The motion in this video is controlled by a human operator.

First recorded dive of the deep-sea ROV Hamire at a depth of 5,882 m

Author  Hyun-Taek Choi

Video ID : 796

This video shows the first deep-sea trial of the ROV Hamire developed by KRISO (Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering) at a depth of 5,882 m.

Chapter 43 — Telerobotics

Günter Niemeyer, Carsten Preusche, Stefano Stramigioli and Dongjun Lee

In this chapter we present an overview of the field of telerobotics with a focus on control aspects. To acknowledge some of the earliest contributions and motivations the field has provided to robotics in general, we begin with a brief historical perspective and discuss some of the challenging applications. Then, after introducing and classifying the various system architectures and control strategies, we emphasize bilateral control and force feedback. This particular area has seen intense research work in the pursuit of telepresence. We also examine some of the emerging efforts, extending telerobotic concepts to unconventional systems and applications. Finally,we suggest some further reading for a closer engagement with the field.

Passive teleoperation of a nonlinear telerobot with tool-dynamics rendering

Author  Dongjun Lee

Video ID : 74

This is a video showing the passive teleoperation of nonlinear master-slave robots using passive decomposition, which enables master-slave coordination, apparent inertia scaling, and tool-dynamics rendering.