关键词： KIDNEY tumors   SURGERY   ENDOSCOPIC surgery   LAPAROSCOPY   SURGICAL robots   NEPHRECTOMY  

摘要： A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article on robot-assisted surgery by Amitabh Chandra and colleagues in the February 2015 issue.

关键词： NASA  

摘要： This paper discusses the actuator-level control of Valkyrie, a new humanoid robot designed by NASA's Johnson Space Center in collaboration with several external partners. Several topics pertaining to Valkyrie's series elastic actuators are presented including control architecture, controller design, and implementation in hardware. A decentralized approach is taken in controlling Valkyrie's many series elastic degrees of freedom. By conceptually decoupling actuator dynamics from robot limb dynamics, the problem of controlling a highly complex system is simplified and the controller development process is streamlined compared to other approaches. This hierarchical control abstraction is realized by leveraging disturbance observers in the robot's joint-level torque controllers. A novel analysis technique is applied to understand the ability of a disturbance observer to attenuate the effects of unmodeled dynamics. The performance of this control approach is demonstrated in two ways. First, torque tracking performance of a single Valkyrie actuator is characterized in terms of controllable torque resolution, tracking error, bandwidth, and power consumption. Second, tests are performed on Valkyrie's arm, a serial chain of actuators, to demonstrate the robot's ability to accurately track torques with the presented decentralized control approach.

关键词： Trials   Performance metrics   robotics   Classification (Cognitive Process)   experimentation   Humanoid robots   Sensor fusion   Robot   critical incident   DARPA   CONTROL ROOM   Teams  

摘要： In December 2013, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials were held in Homestead, Florida. The DRC Trials were designed to test the capabilities of humanoid robots in disaster response scenarios with degraded communications. Each team created their own interaction method to control their robot, either the Boston Dynamics Atlas robot or a robot built by the team itself. Of the 15 competing teams, eight participated in our study of human-robot interaction. We observed the participating teams from the field (with the robot) and in the control room (with the operators), noting many performance metrics, such as critical incidents and utterances, and categorizing their interaction methods according to the number of operators, control methods, and amount of interaction. We decomposed each task into a series of subtasks, different from the DRC Trials official subtasks for points, to gain a better understanding of each team's performance in varying complexities of mobility and manipulation. Each team's interaction methods have been compared to their performance, and correlations have been analyzed to understand why some teams ranked higher than others. We discuss lessons learned from this study, and we have found in general that the guidelines for human-robot interaction for unmanned ground vehicles still hold true: more sensor fusion, fewer operators, and more automation lead to better performance.

关键词： Robotics  

摘要： This paper describes the technical approach, hardware design, and software algorithms that have been used by Team THOR in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials 2013 competition. To overcome big hurdles such as a short development time and limited budget, we focused on forming modular componentsin both hardware and softwareto allow for efficient and cost-effective parallel development. The hardware of THOR-OP (Tactical Hazardous Operations Robot-Open Platform) consists of standardized, advanced actuators and structural components. These aspects allowed for efficient maintenance, quick reconfiguration, and most importantly, a relatively low build cost. We also pursued modularity in the software, which consisted of a hybrid locomotion engine, a hierarchical arm controller, and a platform-independent remote operator interface. These modules yielded multiple control options with different levels of autonomy to suit various situations. The flexible software architecture allowed rapid development, quick migration to hardware changes, and multiple parallel control options. These systems were validated at the DRC Trials, where THOR-OP performed well against other robots and successfully acquired finalist status.

关键词： robotic manipulators   teaching   simulation  

摘要： This paper presents a new toolbox focussed on the teaching of robotic manipulators. The library works under Matlab and has been designed to strengthen the theoretical concepts explained during the theory lectures. The educational approach is focussed on teaching the main concepts through developing math modeling and simulation. In order to do this, the toolbox aims at the fulfillment of a set of practical sessions that allow the students to test most of the concepts of an introductory course in robotic manipulators. In addition, the library possesses features that typically needed the usage of proprietary software, such as the visualization of a realistic 3D representation of commercial robotic arms and the programming of those arms in an industrial language. The practices include the concepts of direct and inverse kinematics, inverse and direct dynamics, path planning and robot programming. As a transversal practice, during the sessions, the student is asked to choose and integrate a new robotic arm in the library, proposing a particular solution to the direct and inverse kinematic problem, as well as the inclusion of other important parameters. The library has been deployed during the last year in bachelor and master studies and has received a nice acceptance. Finally, the library has been assessed in terms of usefulness, design and usage by means of a student survey. In addition, the surveys were designed to establish a relation between the student perception of the system, the time spent on the tool and their learning achievements. (c) 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 23:443-454, 2015;View this article online at;DOI

关键词： SPECIAL issues of periodicals   REMOTE submersibles   PUBLISHERS & publishing   PERIODICAL publishing   PERIODICALS -- Articles  

关键词： human-robot interaction   service robots   social robots   speech synthesis  

摘要： Robot utterances generally sound monotonous, unnatural and unfriendly because their Text-to-Speech systems are not optimized for communication but for text reading. Here, we present a non-monologue speech synthesis for robots. The key novelty lies in speech synthesis based on Hidden Markov models (HMMs) using a non-monologue corpus: we collected a speech corpus in a non-monologue style in which two professional voice talents read scripted dialogues, and HMMs were then trained with the corpus and used for speech synthesis. We conducted experiments in which the proposed method was evaluated by 24 subjects in three scenarios: text reading, dialogue and domestic service robot (DSR) scenarios. In the DSR scenario, we used a physical robot and compared our proposed method with a baseline method using the standard Mean Opinion Score criterion. Our experimental results showed that our proposed method's performance was (1) at the same level as the baseline method in the text-reading scenario and (2) exceeded it in the DSR scenario. We deployed our proposed system as a cloud-based speech synthesis service so that it can be used without any cost.

关键词： Robots  

摘要： Logistics has been the bottleneck in ecommerce, creating problems such as slow and/or wrong deliveries, lost packages, damaged goods and incorrect packing. Automation extends capacities and capabilities as justified by the vast volume of online orders. An automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) can deliver high efficiency but may be limited in flexibility when it comes to dealing with order disparities in size, shape, weight, volume and mechanical properties. The ASRS may not offer adequate scalability to adapt to growth and cope with increased seasonal demands, or deal with facility breakdowns and carry out technical maintenance. Robotics promises to strike a balance between efficiency, scalability and flexibility. This paper addresses two broad questions: (1) How can robotics create a radical paradigm shift in ecommerce logistics automation systems? (2) Who should be responsible for investing in robotic ecommerce logistics facilities and how should the benefits be shared among key stakeholders? The first question is discussed through recent industrial developments in using mobile robots to achieve robotic picking methods including goods to picker/person (G2P), goods to robot (G2R), robot to goods (R2G), and through the bold concepts of robotic grid warehousing and cellular warehousing (CW). The second question is discussed by extending the emerging concept of the Product Service System (PSS) to propose a Logistics Automation Service System (LASS) business model where stakeholders focus on their own core competencies while complementing each other's expertise and sharing risks and benefits. © 2015 The Hong Kong Institution of Engineers.

关键词： Compliant mechanisms  

摘要： Soft robotics is a fast-emerging interdisciplinary field combining mechatronics, control, material science and biomimetics. With their unique inherent compliance feature, soft robots have advantages over rigid-bodied robots for operations in unstructured environments. On the other hand, most soft robots reported to date are laboratory prototypes rather than end products. To fill this gap, they must undergo multiple transitions from an engineering perspective, through which soft robots are optimised in design, fabrication, power, control, and other engineering criteria, and be proven of their application worthiness. This paper compares conventional soft robotic technologies with the latest developments, and reviews the most recent advances of several engineering-oriented aspects of soft robotics research: fabrication technique standardisation which helps improve the repeatability and reliability of soft actuators;modelling and characterisation from both theoretical and simulation approaches which allow for the systematic analysis of soft robot behaviour and performance;evaluation works on soft actuator drive and power methods which provide insights into how to energise and optimise for the most suitable soft robot for a particular application;untethering soft robots which further relax their physical limitations and enable operations over a greater distance across all-terrain, all-habitat environments;and other factors such as actuation speed, fatigue, and failure modes. © 2015 The Hong Kong Institution of Engineers.