Simultaneous localization of multiple unknown CSMA-based wireless sensor network nodes using a mobile robot with a directional antenna

We use a single mobile robot equipped with a directional antenna to simultaneously localize unknown carrier sensing multiple access (CSMA)-based wireless sensor network nodes. We assume the robot can only sense radio transmissions at the physical layer. The robot does not know network configuration such as size and protocol. We formulate this new localization problem and propose a particle filter-based localization approach. We combine a CSMA model and a directional antenna model using multiple particle filters. The CSMA model provides network configuration data while the directional antenna model provides inputs for particle filters to update. Based on the particle distribution, we propose a robot motion planning algorithm that assists the robot to efficiently traverse the field to search radio source. The final localization scheme consists of two algorithms: a sensing algorithms that runs in O(n) time for n particles and a motion planning algorithm that runs in O(nl) time for l radio sources. We have implemented the algorithm, and the results show that the algorithms are capable of localizing unknown networked radio sources effectively and robustly.     

双轴微机械陀螺仪的移动机器人运动检测系统

为准确获得移动机器人在未知环境的运动状态信息,以提高其运动控制的可靠性与平稳度,本文设计了机器人运动状态的检测传输系统。该系统运用改进的自适应UKF滤波算法来处理双轴MEMS陀螺仪测得的数据,通过以ATmega16为微处理器的CAN总线进行传输。实验表明,改进算法能较好地控制MEMS陀螺仪的随机漂移,较正确地获得机器人的运动状态数据,且CAN总线使数据正确率提高0．3％～0．5％。     

基于红外传感皮肤的多关节机器人自主运动方法研究

本文研究了障碍环境下多关节机器人自主实时避碰运动理论、技术与方法. 研制的新型红外传感皮肤, 可以为多关节机器人提供所需要的周围环境信息. 针对非结构化环境下的多关节机器人实时避障问题, 提出了一种未知环境下的机器人模糊路径实时规划新方法. 实验结果表明: 基于研制的红外传感皮肤和模糊运动规划算法, 多关节机器人可以在未知或时变环境下自主工作.     

Direction Sensing RFID Reader for Mobile Robot Navigation

A self-contained direction sensing radio frequency identification (RFID) reader is developed employing a dual-directional antenna for automated target acquisition and docking of a mobile robot in indoor environments. The dual-directional antenna estimates the direction of arrival (DOA) of signals from a transponder by using the ratio of the received signal strengths between two adjacent antennas. This enables the robot to continuously monitor the changes in transponder directions and ensures reliable docking guidance to the target transponder. One of the technical challenges associated with this RFID direction finding is to sustain the accuracy of the estimated DOA that varies according to environmental conditions. It is often the case that the robot loses its way to the target in a cluttered environment. To cope with this problem, the direction correction algorithm is proposed to triangulate the location of the transponder with the most recent three DOA estimates. Theoretical simulation results verify the reliability of the proposed algorithm that quantifies the potential error in the DOA estimation. Using the algorithm, we validate mobile robot docking to an RFID transponder in an office environment occupied by obstacles.     

结合历史运动状态的机器人高效沿墙算法研究

针对目前室内移动机器人沿墙走算法过于复杂、路径易重复、不能完全遍历、效率低等问题, 采用室内未知环境下结合历史状态的机器人沿墙高效遍历研究来解决这些问题. 该算法由移动机器人的上一个周期历史环境运动状态(分8类)、当前环境运动状态(分8类)和旋向信息(分2类)建立运动规则库, 沿墙行走时移动机器人时时采集这三类信息(上一个周期历史环境运动状态、当前环境运动状态和旋向信息)决定移动机器人当前的运动方向, 如此循环直到完成指定的沿墙任务. 最后对该算法进行了仿真与实际实验, 实验结果证明该算法可以在不同的、复杂的环境中高效、快速地完成沿墙走的任务, 并且对室内未知环境有很好的适应性.     

Enhanced direct adaptive fuzzy control of robot manipulators

In this article, an enhanced direct adaptive fuzzy robot controller is developed to overcome problems of high‐frequency oscillations across the boundary of the constraint set and large control signals. The direct adaptive fuzzy robot control algorithm employs tracking errors of the joint motion to drive the parameter adaptation. The predominant concern of the adaptation law is to reduce the tracking errors, and closed‐loop stability is ensured by appending a supervisory controller. This adaptive controller, appended with the supervisory controller, does not require the exact robot dynamics, but only the boundary of the dynamics. Theoretical results and simulation studies on a two‐link robot manipulator show that by modifying the activation function of the supervisory controller, the enhanced direct adaptive fuzzy robot controller is as robust as before and the problems of high‐frequency oscillations across the boundary of the constraint set and large control signals are alleviated. ©1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Noncertainty equivalent adaptive control of robot manipulators without velocity measurements

This paper presents a noncertainty equivalent adaptive motion control scheme for robot manipulators in the absence of link velocity measurements. A new output feedback adaptation algorithm, based on the attractive manifold design approach, is developed. A proportional-integral adaptation is selected for the adaptive parameter estimator to strengthen the passivity of the system. In order to relieve velocity measurements, an observer is designed to estimate the velocities. The controller guarantees semiglobal asymptotic motion tracking and velocity estimation, as well as L_∞ and L₂ bounded parameter estimation error. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is verified by simulations for a two-link robot manipulator and a four-bar linkage. The results are further compared with the earlier certainty-equivalent adaptive partial and full state feedback controller to highlight potential closed-loop performance improvements.     

Real-time navigation using randomized kinodynamic planning with arrival time field

In this paper, we propose a novel path planning algorithm for a mobile robot in dynamic and cluttered environments with kinodynamic constraints. We compute the arrival time field as a bias which gives larger weights for shorter and safer paths toward a goal. We then implement a randomized path search guided by the arrival time field for building the path considering kinematic and dynamic (kinodynamic) constraints of an actual robot. We also consider path quality by adding heuristic constraints on the randomized path search, such as reducing unstable movements of the robot by using a heading criterion. The path will be extracted by backtracking the nodes which reach the goal area to the root of the tree generated by the randomized search, and the motion from the very first node will be sent to the robot controller. We provide a brief comparison between our algorithm and other existing algorithms. Simulation and experimental results prove that our algorithm is fast and reliable to be implemented on the real robot and is able to handle kinodynamic problems effectively.     

The VFO-Driven Motion Planning and Feedback Control in Polygonal Worlds for a Unicycle with Bounded Curvature of Motion

Integrated motion planning and control for the purposes of maneuvering mobile robots under state- and input constraints is a problem of vital practical importance in applications of mobile robots such as autonomous transportation. Those constraints arise naturally in practice due to specifics of robot mechanical construction and the presence of obstacles in motion environment. In contrast to approaches focusing on feedback control design under the assumption of given reference motion or motion planning with neglection of subsequent feedback motion execution, we adopt a controller-driven motion planning paradigm, which has recently gained attention of many researchers. It postulates design of motion planning algorithms dedicated to specific feedback control policies, which compute a sequence of feedback control subtasks instead of classically planned open-loop controls or parametric paths. In this spirit, we propose a motion planning algorithm driven by the VFO (Vector Field Orientation) control law for the waypoint-following task. Presented analysis of the VFO control law reveals its beneficial properties, which are subsequently utilized to solve a generally nonlinear and non-convex optimal motion planning problem by formulating it as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP). The solution proposed in this paper yields a waypoint sequence, which is designed for execution by application of the VFO control law to drive a robot to a prescribed final configuration under an input constraint imposed by bounded curvature of robot motion and state constraints resulting from a convex decomposition of task space. Satisfaction of these constraints is guaranteed analytically and exactly, i.e., without utilization of numerical approximations. Moreover, for a given discrete set of possible waypoint orientations, the proposed algorithm computes plans optimal w.r.t. given cost functional, which can be any convex linear combination of quantities such as robot path length, curvature of robot motion, distance to imposed state constraints, etc. Furthermore, the planning algorithm exploits the possibility of both forward or backward movement of the robot to allow maneuvering in demanding environments. Generated waypoint sequences are a compact representation of a motion plan, which can be immediately executed with the VFO controller without any additional post-processing. Validity of the proposed approach has been confirmed by simulation studies and experimental motion execution with a laboratory-scale mobile robot.     

Differential evolution solution to the SLAM problem

A new solution to the Simultaneous Localization and Modelling problem is presented in this paper. The algorithm is based on the stochastic search for solutions in the state space to the global localization problem by means of a differential evolution algorithm. This non linear evolutive filter, called Evolutive Localization Filter (ELF), searches stochastically along the state space for the best robot pose estimate. The set of pose solutions (the population) focuses on the most likely areas according to the perception and up to date motion information. The population evolves using the log-likelihood of each candidate pose according to the observation and the motion errors derived from the comparison between observed and predicted data obtained from the probabilistic perception and motion model.The proposed SLAM algorithm operates in two steps: in the first step the ELF filter is used at local level to re-localize the robot based on the robot odometry, the laser scan at a given position and a local map where only a low number of the last scans have been integrated. In the second step, the aligned laser measures and the corrected robot poses are used to detect whether the robot is revisiting a previously crossed area (i.e., a cycle in the robot trajectory exists). Once a cycle is detected, the Evolutive Localization Filter is used again to estimate the accumulated residual drift in the detected loop and then to re-estimate the robot poses in order to integrate the sensor measures in the global map of the environment.The algorithm has been tested in different environments to demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness and computational efficiency of the proposed approach.     

基于随机行走的群机器人二维地图构建

机器人在未知环境自主探索时,需要快速准确地获取环境地图信息。针对高效探索和未知环境的地图构建问题,将随机行走算法应用于群机器人的探索中,机器人模拟布朗运动,对搜索区域建图。然后,改进了布朗运动算法,通过设置机器人随机行走时的最大旋转角度,来避免机器人重复性地搜索一个区域,使机器人在相同时间内探索更多的区域,提高机器人的搜索效率。最后,通过搭载激光雷达的多个移动机器人进行了仿真实验,实验分析了最大转角增量、机器人数量以及机器人运动步数对搜索区域的影响。     

室内环境下同步定位与地图创建改进算法

提出了一种室内环境下基于平方根无迹卡尔曼滤波（SRUKF）的同步定位与地图创建（SLAM）算法． 该方法在每步迭代中采用平方根无迹粒子滤波器进行机器人状态估计,并引入平方根无迹卡尔曼滤波器定位路标, 进而完成机器人状态和相应路标信息更新．将本文算法与机器人运动模型和红外标签观测模型结合进行了仿真和实 验,结果表明,本算法在同步定位和地图创建过程中提高了机器人状态和路标估计的精度及稳定性．     

Automatic joint motion planning of 9-DOF robot based on redundancy optimization for wheel hub polishing

Automatic joint motion planning is very important in robotic wheel hub polishing systems. Higher flexibility is achieved based on the joint configuration with multiple solutions, which means that the robot has kinematic redundancy for machining tasks. Redundant joints can be used to optimize the motion of the robot, but less research has been done on multi-dimensional redundant optimization. In this paper, a 6-axis robot with a 3-axis actuator is designed for wheel hub polishing. We propose an automatic joint motion planning method for a nine-axis industrial robot to achieve the shortest processing time. Firstly, offline programming is designed to generate paths for the complex surface of the hub. In order to reduce the machining path points on the surface of the hub, a improved Douglas-Peucker (DP) algorithm is proposed, which can take into account the change of the path point posture. Secondly, the Greedy Best First Search (GBFS) and Sine cosine algorithm (SCA) are combined to find the optimal joint motion efficiently. Moreover, we use nested SCA for comparison to test whether the combined algorithm can avoid local optima. Finally, the performance and computational efficiency of the method are validated in both simulation and real environments based on the hub surface.     

移动机器人的队形控制及其主动避障

在这篇论文中, 我们利用一个统一的算法框架来解决移动机器人的队形控制和主动避障问题, 使得编队中的从机器人在避开障碍物的同时, 能够与被跟踪的主机器人保持期望的相对距离或相对方位. 在现有的关于主—从跟踪编队控制的文献中, 为了实现对主机器人快速准确的跟踪, 从机器人在跟踪控制时需要主机器人在惯性坐标系下的绝对运动速度作为队形跟踪控制器的输入. 然而, 在一些环境中, 主机器人的绝对运动状态很难获得. 这里, 我们将利用主—从机器人之间的相对速度来建立机器人编队系统的运动学模型. 基于这个模型的编队控制方法将不再需要测量主机器人的绝对运动速度. 进一步地, 上述的建模和控制方法被扩展为一个移动机器人的动态避障方法, 该方法利用机器人与障碍物之间相对运动状态作为避障控制器的信息输入. 利用由三个非完整移动机器人组成的多机器人系统, 验证了所提出编队控制方法的有效性.     

Hybrid moment/position control of a parallel robot

In this paper, a hybrid moment/position controller in task space is proposed for tasks involving a contact between a robot and its environment. We consider a contour-tracking task performed by a six DOF (Degrees Of Freedom) parallel robot. The task space dynamic model of the robot in contact with its environment, seen as a black box, is estimated by a MLP-NN (MultiLayer Perceptron Neural Network). The neural network non-linearity is treated using Taylor series expansion. An adaptation algorithm of the neural parameters resulting from a closed-loop stability analysis is proposed. The performance of the proposed controller is validated on the C5 parallel robot by considering two different environments: rigid and compliant.     

Roadmap-based motion planning in dynamic environments

In this paper, a new method is presented for motion planning in dynamic environments, that is, finding a trajectory for a robot in a scene consisting of both static and dynamic, moving obstacles. We propose a practical algorithm based on a roadmap that is created for the static part of the scene. On this roadmap, an approximately time-optimal trajectory from a start to a goal configuration is computed, such that the robot does not collide with any moving obstacle. The trajectory is found by performing a two-level search for a shortest path. On the local level, trajectories on single edges of the roadmap are found using a depth-first search on an implicit grid in state-time space. On the global level, these local trajectories are coordinated using an A/sup */-search to find a global trajectory to the goal configuration. The approach is applicable to any robot type in configuration spaces with any dimension, and the motions of the dynamic obstacles are unconstrained, as long as they are known beforehand. The approach has been implemented for both free-flying and articulated robots in three-dimensional workspaces, and it has been applied to multirobot motion planning, as well. Experiments show that the method achieves interactive performance in complex environments.     

Detection of robustly collision-free trajectories in unpredictable environments in real-time

One of the ultimate goals in robotics is to make robots of high degrees of freedom (DOF) work autonomously in real world environments. However, real world environments are unpredictable, i.e., how the objects move are usually not known beforehand. Thus, whether a robot trajectory is collision-free or not has to be checked on-line based on sensing as the robot moves. Moreover, in order to guarantee safe motion, the motion uncertainty of the robot has to be taken into account. This paper introduces a general approach to detect if a high-DOF robot trajectory is continuously collision-free even in the presence of robot motion uncertainty in an unpredictable environment in real time. Our method is based on the novel concept of dynamic envelope, which takes advantage of progressive sensing over time without predicting motions of objects in an environment or assuming specific object motion patterns. The introduced approach can be used by general real-time motion planners to check if a candidate robot trajectory is continuously and robustly collision-free (i.e., in spite of uncertainty in the robot motion).     

Mobile robot motion estimation by 2D scan matching with genetic and iterative closest point algorithms

The paper reports on mobile robot motion estimation based on matching points from successive two‐dimensional (2D) laser scans. This ego‐motion approach is well suited to unstructured and dynamic environments because it directly uses raw laser points rather than extracted features. We have analyzed the application of two methods that are very different in essence: (i) A 2D version of iterative closest point (ICP), which is widely used for surface registration; (ii) a genetic algorithm (GA), which is a novel approach for this kind of problem. Their performance in terms of real‐time applicability and accuracy has been compared in outdoor experiments with nonstop motion under diverse realistic navigation conditions. Based on this analysis, we propose a hybrid GA‐ICP algorithm that combines the best characteristics of these pure methods. The experiments have been carried out with the tracked mobile robot Auriga‐α and an on‐board 2D laser scanner. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.