With the progress of industry, people are facing more and more complicated tasks, which cannot be completed by conventional rigid robot. For this, a deployable robot based on spherical linkage parallel mechanism was proposed to satisfy relevant requirements for the degrees of freedom in this study. Based on the design of robot model and its control box, a mathematical model for the robot was established, and the relationship between motion space and drive space was deduced accordingly. Subsequently, a control system consisting of the upper and lower computers was introduced. Two control modes, that is, Joystick control and remote control, were developed. The upper computer control interface for the robot was completed by MATLAB construction. At last, the two control modes as well as autonomous detection were demonstrated by motion test. This achievement will further advance the applications of deployable robot in job aid and intelligent exploration.

Subglacial lake exploration is of great interest to the science community. RECoverable Autonomous Sonde (RECAS) provides an exploration tool to measure and sample subglacial lake environments while the subglacial lake remains isolated from the glacier surface and atmosphere. This paper presents an electronic control system design of 200 m prototype of RECAS. The proposed electronic control system consists of a surface system, a downhole control system, and a power transfer and communication system. The downhole control system is the core element of RECAS, and is responsible for sonde status monitoring, sonde motion control, subglacial water sampling and in situ analysis. A custom RS485 temperature sensor was developed to cater for the limited size and depth requirements of the system. We adopted a humidity-based measurement to monitor for a housing leak. This condition is because standard leak detection monitoring of water conductivity may be inapplicable to pure ice in Antarctica. A water sampler control board was designed to control the samplers and monitor the on/off state. A high-definition camera system with built-in storage and self-heating ability was designed to perform the video recording in the subglacial lake. The proposed electronic control system is proven effective after a series of tests.

The first of three Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3-1), a 50/68cm Schmidt-like equatorial-mount telescope, is the first trackable Chinese telescope operating on the Antarctic plateau. It was installed at Dome A (80°22′, 77°21′E, 4,093m), the highest place on the Antarctic plateau, in 2012. The telescope is unmanned during night-time operations through the Austral winter. The telescope optics and mechanics, as well as the motors and position sensors, are exposed to a harsh environment. The mechanics is enclosed with a foldable tent-like dome to prevent snow, diamond dust and ice. While the control cabinet containing drive boxes, circuit board boxes, power converters and the Telescope Control Computer (TCC) is located inside the warm instrumental module. In about 15 weeks remote testing and commissioning, from January 24 when the expedition team left there to May 8, when the communication failed, we obtained images with the best FWHM of less than 2″. We also recorded the telescope movement performance and fine-tuned the dynamic properties of the telescope control system. Some experiences and lessons will be disscussed in this paper.

We study the problem of flatness of two-input driftless control systems. Although acharacterization of flat systems of that class is known, the problems of describing allflat outputs and of calculating them is open and we solve it in the paper. We show thatall x-flat outputs are parameterized by an arbitrary function of threecanonically defined variables. We also construct a system of 1st order PDE’s whosesolutions give all x-flat outputs of two-input driftless systems. Weillustrate our results by describing all x-flat outputs of models of anonholonomic car and the n-trailer system.

We have designed, built, and tested a new wheel control system for the HERMIES-III robot. HERMIES-III is a large mobile robot with omnidirectional steering that is designed for human scale experiments. During each cycle (at 20 Hz), the wheel control system moves the robot toward a goal and calculates the current position of the robot. The system has seven modes for moving to a goal and the goal may be changed during motion of the robot.

This paper presents an advanced control system for an active compliant device. This device, a manipulator-gripper, was designed to achieve stable grasp of objects with various shapes and to impart compliant fine motions to the grasped object. In the control system of this end-effector, we introduced autonomous reasoning capabilities. Fine motion strategies, needed for mating or grasping, use inductive learning from experiments to achieve uncertainty and error recovery. An overview of the articulated gripper's structure is provided for a better understanding of the programming environment we propose. For solving the problem of synthesis programs for fine motion planning we introduce declarative programming facilities in the controller through a time-sensitive mini-prolog. The paper gives some details on the implementation of this mini-prolog. We develop a heuristic procedure to obtain an implicit local model of contacts in complex assembly tasks. Finally, a specific example of this approach – a peg-in-hole operation– –is outlined.

This paper presents analysis and experimental verifications of a new robot manipulator with five degrees of freedom developed for the buffing operation of shoes. First, the forward and inverse kinematics are analyzed. Next, an analytic closed-form solution is rigorously derived for the joint angles corresponding to the position and orientation of the end-effector in Cartesian coordinates. A control system, including input/output interfaces and the related electronic system, is designed for the control of the mechanical structure of the buffing robot. Then, peripheral systems integrated with the conveyer, transfer device, and fixture device are designed for the sequential buffing process of shoes. Also, a graphic user interface (GUI) program including the forward/inverse kinematics, control algorithm, and communication program to interact the robot with the peripheral systems is developed by using visual C++ language. A new flexible toolholder (FTH) is proposed to compensate for the excessive applied force between deburring tools and shoes. Finally, the test results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

We propose a new, control theoretic methodology for defining performance measures of mobile manipulators. As a guiding principle, we assume that the kinematics or the dynamics of a mobile manipulator are represented by the end point map of a control system with outputs, and that a locally controllable system yields nontrivial performance measures. In the paper, we focus on two categories of dynamic performance measures: the compliance measure and the admittance measure. In both these categories, the following local and global performance characteristics are introduced: the agility ellipsoid, the agility and mobility, the condition number and the distortion. The usefulness of new local measures is demonstrated on the example of determining optimal motion patterns of a wheeled mobile robot.

A two-degree of freedom control system that is most frequently encountered in practice is the so-called Internal Model Control (IMC) structure. However, the design procedure of such a structure does not present an easy task, which implies a limited utility of IMC. In this paper two alternative solutions are proposed that may be lumped together as Model-Following Control (MFC). These are two-loop control systems being easy to implement and offering interesting properties. Theoretical assumptions have been verified experimentally on a two-joint robot manipulator. Both qualitative and quantitative results yielded by experiments are presented and discussed.

The SUSI control system is a distributed real-time system currently consisting of 17 processors. A custom real-time operating system and network protocols ensure synchronous operation of servo loops across multiple processors.