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Chapter 75 — Biologically Inspired Robotics

Fumiya Iida and Auke Jan Ijspeert

Throughout the history of robotics research, nature has been providing numerous ideas and inspirations to robotics engineers. Small insect-like robots, for example, usually make use of reflexive behaviors to avoid obstacles during locomotion, whereas large bipedal robots are designed to control complex human-like leg for climbing up and down stairs. While providing an overview of bio-inspired robotics, this chapter particularly focus on research which aims to employ robotics systems and technologies for our deeper understanding of biological systems. Unlike most of the other robotics research where researchers attempt to develop robotic applications, these types of bio-inspired robots are generally developed to test unsolved hypotheses in biological sciences. Through close collaborations between biologists and roboticists, bio-inspired robotics research contributes not only to elucidating challenging questions in nature but also to developing novel technologies for robotics applications. In this chapter, we first provide a brief historical background of this research area and then an overview of ongoing research methodologies. A few representative case studies will detail the successful instances in which robotics technologies help identifying biological hypotheses. And finally we discuss challenges and perspectives in the field.

Biologically inspired robotics (or bio-inspired robotics in short) is a very broad research area because almost all robotic systems are, in one way or the other, inspired from biological systems. Therefore, there is no clear distinction between bio-inspired robots and the others, and there is no commonly agreed definition [75.1]. For example, legged robots that walk, hop, and run are usually regarded as bio-inspired robots because many biological systems rely on legged locomotion for their survival. On the other hand, many robotics researchers implement biologicalmodels ofmotion control and navigation onto wheeled platforms, which could also be regarded as bio-inspired robots [75.2].

JenaWalker - Biped robot with biologically-inspired, bi-articular springs

Author  Fumiya Iida, Auke Ijspeertb

Video ID : 110

This video presents dynamic locomotion of a passivity-based, biped robot which contains biologically inspired bi-articular springs. The platform was developed for the purpose of understanding the roles of diverse muscle groups in human legs. A set of mechanical tension springs was incorporated to simulate muscles including bi-articular muscles which span two joints.

Chapter 62 — Intelligent Vehicles

Alberto Broggi, Alex Zelinsky, Ümit Özgüner and Christian Laugier

This chapter describes the emerging robotics application field of intelligent vehicles – motor vehicles that have autonomous functions and capabilities. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 62.1 provides a motivation for why the development of intelligent vehicles is important, a brief history of the field, and the potential benefits of the technology. Section 62.2 describes the technologies that enable intelligent vehicles to sense vehicle, environment, and driver state, work with digital maps and satellite navigation, and communicate with intelligent transportation infrastructure. Section 62.3 describes the challenges and solutions associated with road scene understanding – a key capability for all intelligent vehicles. Section 62.4 describes advanced driver assistance systems, which use the robotics and sensing technologies described earlier to create new safety and convenience systems for motor vehicles, such as collision avoidance, lane keeping, and parking assistance. Section 62.5 describes driver monitoring technologies that are being developed to mitigate driver fatigue, inattention, and impairment. Section 62.6 describes fully autonomous intelligent vehicles systems that have been developed and deployed. The chapter is concluded in Sect. 62.7 with a discussion of future prospects, while Sect. 62.8 provides references to further reading and additional resources.

Inria/Ligier automated parallel-parking demo in an open parking area

Author  Christian Laugier, Igor Paromtchik

Video ID : 567

This video shows a pioneer demonstration of the concept of "autonomous parallel parking" on the early Inria/Ligier autonomous vehicle (1996). The approach does not require any prior model of the parking area. The car is controlled using information coming from inexpensive, on-board sensors, and motion control decisions (including parking maneuvers) are taken online according to the state of the sensed environment. Public demonstrations of the systems have been performed during several publicized and scientific events (including during three days at the IEEE/RSJ IROS 1997 Conference). More technical details can be found in [62.89].

Speed-sign detection

Author  Alberto Broggi, Alexander Zelinsky, Ümit Ozgüner, Christian Laugier

Video ID : 838

This video demonstrates robust speed-sign extraction under variable conditions, i.e., day and night. The system uses the unique radial symmetry detector to achieve robustness.

Chapter 72 — Social Robotics

Cynthia Breazeal, Kerstin Dautenhahn and Takayuki Kanda

This chapter surveys some of the principal research trends in Social Robotics and its application to human–robot interaction (HRI). Social (or Sociable) robots are designed to interact with people in a natural, interpersonal manner – often to achieve positive outcomes in diverse applications such as education, health, quality of life, entertainment, communication, and tasks requiring collaborative teamwork. The long-term goal of creating social robots that are competent and capable partners for people is quite a challenging task. They will need to be able to communicate naturally with people using both verbal and nonverbal signals. They will need to engage us not only on a cognitive level, but on an emotional level as well in order to provide effective social and task-related support to people. They will need a wide range of socialcognitive skills and a theory of other minds to understand human behavior, and to be intuitively understood by people. A deep understanding of human intelligence and behavior across multiple dimensions (i. e., cognitive, affective, physical, social, etc.) is necessary in order to design robots that can successfully play a beneficial role in the daily lives of people. This requires a multidisciplinary approach where the design of social robot technologies and methodologies are informed by robotics, artificial intelligence, psychology, neuroscience, human factors, design, anthropology, and more.

A learning companion robot to foster pre-K vocabulary learning

Author  Cynthia Breazeal

Video ID : 564

This video summarizes a study where a learning-companion robot engages children in a storytelling game over repeated encounters over two months. The learning objective is for pre-K children to learn targeted vocabulary words which the robot introduces in its stories. In each session, the robot first tells a story and then invites the child to tell a story. A storyscape app on a tablet computer facilitates the narration of the story. While the child tells his or her story, the robot behaves as an engaged listener. Two conditions were investigated where the robot either matched the complexity of its stories to the child's language level, or does not. Results show that children successfully learn target vocabulary with the robot in general, and more words are learned when the complexity of the robot's stories matches the language ability of the child.

Learning how to be a learning companion for children

Author  Cynthia Breazeal

Video ID : 560

This video demonstration describes a project whereby we train a policy via learning-by-demonstration for a social robot to serve as a learning companion for young children during free-form educational play. Training data was captured during a Wizard-of-Oz paradigm where the robot played the color-mixing game app with 183 children. Once the model was trained on this data, we did a human-participant study with 85 children to compare the behavior and efficacy of the autonomous robot versus a Wizard-of-Oz-controlled robot. We also compared the children's behavior to just playing the game app without a robot learning companion. We found that the presence of the robot learning companion resulted in deeper exploration of the subject matter of the app (color mixing) and more behaviors targeted to this activity (e.g., there was more random tapping of the app when the robot was not present). The autonomous robot's behavior was not statistically different from the Wizard-of-Oz-controlled robot.

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.

HERMES, a humanoid experimental robot for mobile manipulation and exploration services

Author  Rainer Bischoff

Video ID : 783

Mobile robot HERMES grasps and releases a glass with tactile sensing using joint-angle, encoder values and motor currents. The robot can fill a glass with water from a bottle using vision. It can communicate with natural spoken language,and it can come to you to get your cup and take the cup to the kitchen, by planning a path and avoiding obstacles.

Chapter 51 — Modeling and Control of Underwater Robots

Gianluca Antonelli, Thor I. Fossen and Dana R. Yoerger

This chapter deals with modeling and control of underwater robots. First, a brief introduction showing the constantly expanding role of marine robotics in oceanic engineering is given; this section also contains some historical backgrounds. Most of the following sections strongly overlap with the corresponding chapters presented in this handbook; hence, to avoid useless repetitions, only those aspects peculiar to the underwater environment are discussed, assuming that the reader is already familiar with concepts such as fault detection systems when discussing the corresponding underwater implementation. Themodeling section is presented by focusing on a coefficient-based approach capturing the most relevant underwater dynamic effects. Two sections dealing with the description of the sensor and the actuating systems are then given. Autonomous underwater vehicles require the implementation of mission control system as well as guidance and control algorithms. Underwater localization is also discussed. Underwater manipulation is then briefly approached. Fault detection and fault tolerance, together with the coordination control of multiple underwater vehicles, conclude the theoretical part of the chapter. Two final sections, reporting some successful applications and discussing future perspectives, conclude the chapter. The reader is referred to Chap. 25 for the design issues.

Dive with REMUS

Author  Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Video ID : 87

Travel with a REMUS 100 autonomous, underwater vehicle on a dive off the Carolina coast to study the connection between the physical processes in the ocean at the edge of the continental shelf and the things that live there. Video footage by Chris Linder. Funding by the Department of the Navy, Science & Technology; and Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (COSEE).

Chapter 6 — Model Identification

John Hollerbach, Wisama Khalil and Maxime Gautier

This chapter discusses how to determine the kinematic parameters and the inertial parameters of robot manipulators. Both instances of model identification are cast into a common framework of least-squares parameter estimation, and are shown to have common numerical issues relating to the identifiability of parameters, adequacy of the measurement sets, and numerical robustness. These discussions are generic to any parameter estimation problem, and can be applied in other contexts.

For kinematic calibration, the main aim is to identify the geometric Denavit–Hartenberg (DH) parameters, although joint-based parameters relating to the sensing and transmission elements can also be identified. Endpoint sensing or endpoint constraints can provide equivalent calibration equations. By casting all calibration methods as closed-loop calibration, the calibration index categorizes methods in terms of how many equations per pose are generated.

Inertial parameters may be estimated through the execution of a trajectory while sensing one or more components of force/torque at a joint. Load estimation of a handheld object is simplest because of full mobility and full wrist force-torque sensing. For link inertial parameter estimation, restricted mobility of links nearer the base as well as sensing only the joint torque means that not all inertial parameters can be identified. Those that can be identified are those that affect joint torque, although they may appear in complicated linear combinations.

Calibration of ABB's IRB 120 industrial robot

Author  Ilian Bonev

Video ID : 422

The video depicts the process for the geometric calibration of the 6 DOF IRB 120. The calibration is based on the measurement of the position and the orientation of a tool using the laser tracking system from FARO. The video shows in sequence the steps in the acquisition of various configurations which can then be be employed using an algorithm similar to that of Sect. 6.2.

Chapter 46 — Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Cyrill Stachniss, John J. Leonard and Sebastian Thrun

This chapter provides a comprehensive introduction in to the simultaneous localization and mapping problem, better known in its abbreviated form as SLAM. SLAM addresses the main perception problem of a robot navigating an unknown environment. While navigating the environment, the robot seeks to acquire a map thereof, and at the same time it wishes to localize itself using its map. The use of SLAM problems can be motivated in two different ways: one might be interested in detailed environment models, or one might seek to maintain an accurate sense of a mobile robot’s location. SLAM serves both of these purposes.

We review the three major paradigms from which many published methods for SLAM are derived: (1) the extended Kalman filter (EKF); (2) particle filtering; and (3) graph optimization. We also review recent work in three-dimensional (3-D) SLAM using visual and red green blue distance-sensors (RGB-D), and close with a discussion of open research problems in robotic mapping.

Pose graph compression for laser-based SLAM 3

Author  Cyrill Stachniss

Video ID : 451

This video illustrates pose graph compression, a technique for achieving long-term SLAM, as discussed in Chap.46.5, Springer Handbook of Robotics, 2nd edn (2016). Reference: H. Kretzschmar, C. Stachniss: Information-theoretic compression of pose graphs for laser-based SLAM, Int. J. Robot. Res. 31(11), 1219-1230 (2012).

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.

An assistive, decision-and-control architecture for force-sensitive, hand-arm systems driven via human-machine interfaces (MM1)

Author  Jörn Vogel, Sami Haddadin, John D. Simeral, Daniel Bacher , Beata Jarosiewicz, Leigh R. Hochberg, John P. Donoghue, Patrick van der Smagt

Video ID : 619

The video shows the "grasp" and "release" skills demonstrated in a 1-D control task using the Braingate2 neural-interface system. The robot is controlled through a multipriority Cartesian impedance controller and its behavior is extended with collision detection and reflex reaction. Furthermore, virtual workspaces are added to ensure safety. On top of this, a decision-and-control architecture, which uses sensory information available from the robotic system to evaluate the current state of task execution, is employed.