Researchers from the Japanese company Toyota have designed and patented a motor car that, they claim, expresses emotions. They say that the car is able to laugh, cry or show anger and is also capable of singing to its occupants.

The design of multifunctional upper limb prosthetics has been investigated in recent years. Several areas or research need to be developed for successful implementation of dextrous upper limb prosthesis, in particular better EMG interfaces for implementing command languages.

This article introduces a novel three-bit EMG command language concept as a user interface for the multifunctional MANUS prosthesis prototype. Following the global approach proposed by MANUS, a training process and the supporting Virtual Reality training software are also presented. The last section describes the evaluation process and the results.

A task-oriented system structure has been developed. In normal industrial robot programming, the path is created and the process is based on the path. Here a process-focused method is proposed, where a task can be split in sub-tasks, one for each part of the process with similar process-characteristics. By carefully encapsulating the information needed to execute a sub-task, this component can be re-used whenever the actual sub-task occurs. Applications using system design do not change between simulation and actual shop floor runs and the system allows a mix of real- and simulated components during simulation and run-time.

Cooperative robots are usually required in flexible manufacturing systems or complex working environments. In particular, when an object under processing is too big or too heavy, a single robot may not be enough to handle it. Two or more manipulators are to be used in such a case. This paper presents the study of the dynamic equations for two industrial robots holding a rigid object. To this end, holonomic constraints are combined with the manipulators and object equations of motion to obtain the dynamic model of the whole system, which can be used for simulation purposes. Experimental results are presented to validate the theoretical results.

Structural flexibility is an inherent characteristic of a class of macro-micro manipulators consisting of a rigid micro manipulator mounted on a long-reach (flexible) macro manipulator. Vibrations caused by flexibility make it difficult to achieve accurate control of the end-point of the micro manipulator. In this paper, we develop a control strategy that can be applied to such a system. An experimental test-bed has been developed in which a 6 DOF PUMA 560 manipulator is mounted on a compliant platform. The control strategy consists of a rigid body inverse dynamics controller together with a neural network based strategy for damping out the oscillations due to the flexible base. Experimental results obtained from the test-bed are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

For conventional designs of robots, manipulator motions result in forces and moments on the base. These forces and moments may cause undesirable translation and rotation of the base. The objective of this paper is to systematically analyze the fundamentals of reactionless robots. Based on this analysis, a design of one distinct class of spatial robot is proposed. The design is achieved through appropriate choices of geometric and inertial parameters. Due to the underlying conservation laws, the trajectory must satisfy additional constraints. We illustrate the reactionless feature of this robot through computer simulations. We are also fabricating reactionless robots to illustrate the underlying concepts.

This study presents a novel means of assessing upper limb tasks by using mechanical energy. Potential energy quantifies six work related activities, studied for 20 working-age non-prosthesis users and three powered below elbow prosthesis users. Two marker trajectories on each of the upper arms, forearms, and hands were captured using a 3-camera VICON 140™ system. Task and arm dominance of non-prosthesis users are highly significant ($p\,{<}\,0.01$) with arm dominance effects being more pronounced for prosthesis users. Qualitative inter-repetition consistency is also concordant with observed increased cumulative trauma disorders among prosthesis users.

A fuzzy logic controller for an omni-directional, autonomous guided vehicle (AGV) implementing Mecanum wheels to achieve directional control of its motion is presented. Omni-directional robotic platforms advantage over conventional designs is that they are capable of performing tasks in congested environments. The AGV's behaviour during navigation is controlled using a fuzzy logic controller, with slip detection.

This paper describes a micro-optical three-axis tactile sensor capable of sensing not only normal force, but also shearing force. The normal force was detected from the integrated gray-scale values of bright pixels emitted from the contact area of conical feelers. The conical feelers were formed on a rubber sheet surface that maintains contact with an optical waveguide plate. The shearing force was detected from horizontal displacement of the conical feeler. In the experiments, a precise multi-axial loading machine was developed to measure sensing characteristics of the present sensor. Results show that the normal force was specified uniquely under combined force conditions and that the shearing force was specified by modifying the relationship between the shearing force and the horizontal displacement on the basis of normal force. We formulated a set of expressions to derive the normal force and the shearing force by taking into account this modification. Furthermore, calibration coefficients were identified for transforming the integration of gray-scale values into the normal force and for transforming the horizontal displacement into the shearing force. This result suggests that the expressions can estimate the normal force and the shearing force in wide-load regions.

In this paper, jamming analyses of the three dimensional dual peg-in-hole are presented. First, for a three dimensional dual peg-in-hole, possible contact states are enumerated and geometric analyses are presented. Second, the contact forces are described by the screw theory in three dimensions. The force/moment equations for static equilibrium states of three dimensional dual-peg insertions are derived. Third, jamming diagrams are obtained. Eleven kinds of possible jamming diagrams are analyzed. Finally, an experiment of a dual peg-in-hole assembly is presented to show the effectiveness of the above analyses.

A new solution of the inverse kinematics task for a 3-DOF parallel manipulator with a R-P-S joint structure is obtained for a given position of end-effector in the form of simple position equations. Based on this the number of the inverse kinematics task solutions was investigated, in general, equal to four. We identify the size of the manipulator feasible area and simple relationships are found between the position and orientation of the platform. We prove a new theorem stating that, while the end-effector traces a circular horizontal path with its centre at the vertical z-axis, the norm of the joint coordinates vector remains constant.

This paper introduces conformal geometric algebra (CGA) for applications in computer vision and robotics. The authors show that CGA deals with our intuition and insight of the geometry and it helps us to reduce considerably the computational burden of the problems. The CGA can be applied not only to describe the geometry of the space, but to handle the algebra of incidence, as well as conformal transformations, to deal with kinematics or projective geometry problems. The authors show with real and simulated applications that this system can be of great advantage in robotics and computer vision.

Inverse dynamic calculations are often performed in the analysis of human ambulation. However, assumptions are made in the construction of the models that may not be valid for some prosthetic componentry, specifically polycentric knees used by transfemoral amputees. Data were collected for one subject using a polycentric knee. Moments and forces were calculated when ignoring the extra linkages of the knee and when including the extra linkages of the knee. Significant differences were seen in the hip moment and power between the two cases and indicate that care must be taken when comparing componentry that violates the basic assumptions of the rigid link model.

In this paper, the problem of precision reaching applications in robotic systems for scenarios with static and non-static objects has been considered and a solution based on a modular neural architecture has been proposed and implemented. The goal of this solution is to combine robustness and capability mapping trajectories from two biologically plausible neural network sub-modules: Hyper RBF and AVITE. The Hyper Basis Radial Function (HypRBF) neural network solves the inverse kinematic in redundant robotic systems, while the Adaptive Vector Integration to End-Point (AVITE) visuo-motor neural model quickly maps the difference vector between current and desired position in both spatial (visual information) and motor coordinates (propioceptive information). The anthropomorphic behaviour of the proposed architecture for reaching and tracking tasks in presence of spatial perturbations has been validated over a real arm-head robotic platform.

The aim of the project has been to provide a prosthesis which is capable of adapting to different modes of locomotion whilst optimising the hip power available to the user.

The prosthesis provides stance control ranging from minimal resistance to a yielding lock, capable of detecting level walking, ramp descent, stair descent, standing and instances of stumble. The stance resistance is set to preprogrammed levels for each mode, which matches the user's level of control.

10 amputees participated during the early development trails of the Adaptive Prosthesis for project validation. 7 used the limb for over 3 months and 3 for over 2 years. Early feedback indicated enhanced control and increased comfort and safety during ambulation and manoeuvring various terrains. Minor modification to increase reliability of cabling was also made.

This paper discusses the techniques and their applications in the development of a path planning system composed of three modules, namely: global vision (GVM), trajectory planning (TPM) and navigation control (NCM). The GVM captures and processes the workspace image to identify the obstacle and the robot configurations. These configurations are used by the TPM to generate the Voronoi roadmap, to compute the maximal clearance shortest feasible path and the visibility pathway between two configurations. The NCM controls the robot functionalities and navigation. To validate the path planning system, three sets of experiments have been conducted using the Lab robot Khepera, which have shown very good results.

In this study, a new approach of adaptive control law for controlling robot manipulators using the Lyapunov based theory is derived, thus the stability of an uncertain system is guaranteed. The control law includes a PD feed forward part and a full dynamics feed forward compensation part with the unknown manipulator and payload parameters. The novelty of the obtained result is that an adaptive control algorithm is developed using trigonometric functions depending on manipulator kinematics, inertia parameters and tracking error, and both system parameters and adaptation gain matrix are updated in time.

An adaptive fuzzy sliding control scheme is proposed to control a passive robotic manipulator. The motivation for the design of the adaptive fuzzy sliding controller is to eliminate the chattering and the requirement of pre-knowledge on bounds of error associated with the conventional sliding control. The stability and convergence of the adaptive fuzzy sliding controller is proven both theoretically and practically by simulations. A three-link passive manipulator model with two unactuated joints is derived to be used in the simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system is robust against structured and unstructured uncertainties.

In this paper, the kinematics and inverse dynamics of a novel kind of mechanism called a general 3-PRS parallel mechanism is investigated. In the kinematics study, the inverse kinematics solution is derived in closed form, and the forward kinematics problem is resolved by the Newton iterative method seeking for an on-line solution to this issue. The inverse dynamics analysis is approached with two methods: Lagrangian formulations and principle of virtual work. After deriving the dynamic model by a Lagrangian formulation approach, the simulation results of two introduced examples quantitatively and qualitatively verify the accuracy of the derived dynamic equations. By introducing a simplifying hypothesis, a simplified dynamic model is set up using principle of virtual work, also a computer simulation is performed on this reduced model. The simulation results demonstrate that the simplified dynamic model is reasonable under such kind of assumptions through comparison with the precise model derived from the Lagrangian formulation. The inverse dynamics analysis provides a sound basis to develop controllers for controlling over a general 3-PRS parallel robot.

In this paper a novel approach to dynamic formulation of rovers has been presented. The complexity of these multi-body systems especially on rough terrain, challenged us to use the Kane's method which has been preferred to others in these cases. As an example, symbolic equations of a six-wheeled rover, named CEDRA Rescue Robot which uses a shrimp like mechanism, have been derived and a simulation of forward and inverse dynamics has been presented. Due to the clear form of equations, each term defines a physical meaning which represents the effect of each parameter, resulting in a frame-work for performance comparison of rovers. Although the method has been described for a 2-D non-slipping case, it is also very useful for dimensional and dynamical optimization, high speed motion analysis, and checking various control algorithms. Furthermore, it can be extended to 3-D cases and other complicated mechanisms and rovers while conserving its inherent benefits and adding to the ease of handling nonholonomic constraints.