13 accepted papers
This paper introduces a crawler robot equipped with a movable bending point mechanism that allows it to bend anywhere along its trunk. The robot features a movable motor unit that travels along its body, dynamically adjusting the bending initiation point. This enables the robot to move forward and b
Bio-inspired multi-joint snake robots offer the advantages of terrain adaptability due to their limbless structure and high flexibility. However, a series of dozens of motor units in typical multiple-joint snake robots results in a heavy body structure and hundreds of watts of high power consumption
Continuum robot arms that can access confined spaces are useful in many applications, such as invasive surgery, search and rescue, and inspection. However, their reach is often limited because their extension mechanism relies on elastic deformation or folding structures. To address this challenge, w
Woodpeckers have flexible and extendable tongues that they use to reach their prey through tiny openings in trees and insect burrows. This unique capability of their tongue represents a promising design for a tool for picking up and handling objects in unstructured environments. Although continuum r
Magnetic distortions due to existing appliances and on-board objects with ferromagnetic materials cause serious bias and deviations in motion estimation by inertial measurement sensors with magnetometers. This problem requires a proper sensor fusion to do motion tracking with a minimal angular error
Motion control of underactuated systems through the inverse dynamics contains configuration singularities. These limitations in configuration space mainly stem from the inertial coupling that passive joints/bodies create. In this study, we present a model that is free from singularity while the traj…
An adaptive trajectory tracking problem for a spherical rolling robot driven by a 2DOF pendulum is considered in this paper. A feedback controller is proposed for the goal of tracking the trajectory for the full configuration of the spherical robot. To deal with time-varying uncertainty of the syste…
This paper deals with a trajectory tracking problem for the ball-pendulum system, a spherical rolling robot driven by a two degree of freedom pendulum. The backstepping technique is applied and first tested on the hoop-pendulum system, a planar case of the ball-pendulum. By mimicking the backsteppin…
The paper presents an analysis of human-like reaching movements in manipulation of parallel flexible objects. To predict the trajectory of human hand, a minimum hand jerk model, based on the minimization of integral of squared hand jerk over the movement duration is established. It is shown that wit…
This paper deals with motion planning and control for an underactuated system, the hoop-pendulum, a pendulum mounted at the center of a hoop. The dynamic model for this system is derived and the local controllability around the equilibrium point is established. To transfer the system from a initial
This paper deals with the dynamics and motion planning for a spherical rolling robot with a pendulum actuated by two motors. First a dynamic model for the rolling robot is established. In general, not all feasible kinematic trajectories of the rolling carrier are dynamically realizable. A notable ex…
This paper deals with motion planning problems for spherical rolling robots driven by a two degree of freedom pendulum. A full dynamic model for this system is first introduced. Then, assuming that the contact path is specified and the sphere moves in pure rolling mode, the full dynamic model is red…
Conventional motion planners for wheeled vehicles often assume no-slipping and no-skidding conditions and construct motion trajectories in the context of nonholonomic motion planning. However, in some practical situations slipping and skidding cannot be ignored or can even be useful. To take them in…