Deadlock-free dynamic resource assignment in multi-robot systems with multiple missions： application in wireless sensor networks

In unstructured environments, dynamic resource assignment is required for effective cooperation of robot teams. In some scenarios, robots are in charge of executing multiple missions simultaneously. This creates risks of deadlock due to the presence of shared resources among various missions. The main contribution of this paper is the development of a novel approach that combines the one-step look-ahead deadlock avoidance policy with dynamic resource assignment. The dynamic resource assignment is achieved using greedy resource assignment for multi-mission robot teams in the framework of a matrix-based discrete event controller. Simulation results are presented in MATLAB°R to discuss in detail the proposed control strategy. The paper also discusses the toolkit developed in LabVIEW°R which is used to implement this control framework using a suitable example.     

A new mobile robot control approach via fusion of control signals.

This paper proposes an alternative approach to address the problem of coordinating behaviors in mobile robot navigation: fusion of control signals. Such approach is based on a set of two decentralized information filters, which accomplish the data fusion involved. Besides these two fusion engines, control architectures designed according to this approach also embed a set of different controllers that generate reference signals for the robot linear and angular speeds. Such signals are delivered to the two decentralized information filters, which estimate suitable overall reference signals for the robot linear and angular speeds, respectively. Thus, the background for designing such control architectures is provided by the nonlinear systems theory, which makes this approach different from any other yet proposed. This background also allows checking control architectures designed according to the proposed approach for stability. Such analysis is carried out in the paper, and shows that the robot always reaches its final destination, in spite of either obstacles along its path or the environment layout. As an example, a control architecture is designed to guide a mobile robot in an experiment, whose results allows checking the good performance of the control architecture and validating the design approach proposed as well.     

Robot docking based on omnidirectional vision and reinforcement learning

We present a system for visual robotic docking using an omnidirectional camera coupled with the actor critic reinforcement learning algorithm. The system enables a PeopleBot robot to locate and approach a table so that it can pick an object from it using the pan-tilt camera mounted on the robot. We use a staged approach to solve this problem as there are distinct subtasks and different sensors used. Starting with random wandering of the robot until the table is located via a landmark, then a network trained via reinforcement allows the robot to turn to and approach the table. Once at the table the robot is to pick the object from it. We argue that our approach has a lot of potential allowing the learning of robot control for navigation and remove the need for internal maps of the environment. This is achieved by allowing the robot to learn couplings between motor actions and the position of a landmark.     

A Synchronization Approach to Trajectory Tracking of Multiple Mobile Robots While Maintaining Time-Varying Formations

In this paper, we present a synchronization approach to trajectory tracking of multiple mobile robots while maintaining time-varying formations. The main idea is to control each robot to track its desired trajectory while synchronizing its motion with those of other robots to keep relative kinematics relationships, as required by the formation. First, we pose the formation-control problem as a synchronization control problem and identify the synchronization control goal according to the formation requirement. The formation error is measured by the position synchronization error, which is defined based on the established robot network. Second, we develop a synchronous controller for each robot's translation to guarantee that both position and synchronization errors approach zero asymptotically. The rotary controller is also designed to ensure that the robot is always oriented toward its desired position. Both translational and rotary controls are supported by a centralized high-level planer for task monitoring and robot global localization. Finally, we perform simulations and experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed synchronization control approach in the formation control tasks.     

一种多模型融合的仿猎豹四足机器人复杂运动控制方法

针对具有2自由度主动脊柱关节的仿猎豹四足机器人,基于任务分解思想和生物神经系统机理,提出多模型融合的控制方法。该方法以弹簧负载倒立摆模型实现单腿跳跃控制,通过中枢模式发生器（CPG）实现4条腿之间以及脊柱―腿之间的协调控制,利用虚拟模型控制实现机器人与环境交互,采用基于CPG输出的有限状态机来融合3个控制模型,构建仿猎豹四足机器人的多模型分层运动控制器。参考猎豹脊柱运动特征,设计了机器人脊柱关节运动模式,给出脊柱与腿的协调控制策略。最后,在Webots仿真环境中搭建了仿猎豹四足机器人虚拟样机,实现了不同步态下的脊柱―腿的协调控制、在崎岖地形上稳定奔跑,以及平滑的对角―疾驰―对角步态转换,仿真结果验证了所提出的多模型融合的四足机器人运动控制方法的有效性。     

机器人超声接近觉传感器的研究

根据机器人超声接近觉的实际要求选择了超声探头,研制了相应的模拟控制电路和数字控制电路,并根据机器人控制系统结构的需要设计了相应的信号采集电路部分,对机器人超声接近觉传感器进行了某些研究.进行的校准后所作的性能测试已经表明,该接近觉传感器可以满足机械手控制的实际需要。     

Modeling robot cognitive activity through active mental entities

This paper aims at laying down the foundations of an approach to the development of autonomous robot control architecture based on the explicit representation of mental attitudes underlying robot behavior, considered as autonomous active entities. The approach is intended to integrate concepts from the area of distributed architectures and of mental attitude representation and aims at realizing an explicit motivational basis for robot behavior. Starting from an analysis of the evolution of autonomous robot control architectures, we discuss and motivate the introduction of active mental entities in the context of a distributed control architecture. Attention is then focused on two classes of mental entities, namely intender and attender: their main features are illustrated and discussed. A prototypical implementation of the proposed paradigm and its application to the control of the Khepera simulator are then described. A comparison with related works and a discussion of the main directions of future research conclude the paper.     

A Position and Torque Switching Control Method for Robot Collision Safety

With the increasing number of human-robot interaction applications, robot control characteristics and their effects on safety as well as performance should be taken account into the robot control system. In this paper, a position and torque switching control method was proposed to improve the robot safety and performance, when robots and humans work in the same space. The switching control method includes two modes, the position control mode using a proportion-integral (PI) algorithm, and the torque control mode using sliding mode control (SMC) algorithm for eliminating swing. Under the normal condition, the robot works in position control mode for trajectory tracking with quick response. Once the robot and human collide, the robot will switch to torque control mode immediately, and the impact force will be restricted within a safe range. When the robot and human detach, the robot will resume to position control mode automatically. Moreover, for a better performance, the joint torque is detected from direct-current (DC) motor’s current rather than the torque sensor. The experiment results show that the proposed approach is effective and feasible.     

Matrix-based streamization approach for improving locality and parallelism on FT64 stream processor

FT64 is the first 64-bit stream processor designed for scientific computing. It is critical to exploit optimizing streamization approaches for scientific applications on FT64 due to the inefficiency of direct streamization approach. In this paper, we propose a novel matrix-based streamization approach for improving locality and parallelism of scientific applications on FT64. First, a Data&Computation Matrix is built to abstract the relationship between loops and arrays of the original programs, and it is helpful for formulating the streamization problem. Second, three key techniques for optimizing streamization approach are proposed based on the transformations of the matrix, i.e., coarse-grained program transformations, fine-grained program transformations, and stream organization optimizations. Finally, we apply our approach to ten typical scientific application kernels on FT64. The experimental results show that the matrix-based streamization approach achieves an average speedup of 2.76 over the direct streamization approach, and performs equally to or better than the corresponding Fortran programs on Itanium 2 except CG. It is certain that the matrix-based streamization approach is a promising and practical solution to efficiently exploit the tremendous potential of FT64.

Robust Fuzzy Control of Electrical Manipulators

Stability analysis for fuzzy control of robot manipulators has been a serious challenging problem in literature. The theoretical difficulties are highly increased due to the complexity of both manipulator dynamics and fuzzy controller structure. This paper develops a novel robust fuzzy control approach for electrical robot manipulators using the direct method of Lyapunov. We pass analytical difficulties by the use of voltage control strategy in replace of torque control strategy. Then, a normalized and decentralized Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy controller is presented in a simple structure. A simple Lyapunov candidate is proposed to apply stability analysis without knowing the explicit dynamics of system. Consequently, fuzzy control is analyzed and designed as a robust nonlinear control. Roles of scaling factors, gains in consequent parts, and membership functions in condition parts are considered in the control design. The proposed control approach is applied on a Puma560 robot arm.     

基于CPLD的彩色视觉移动机器人路径跟踪系统

路径跟踪是机器人视觉导航控制基本技术之一,为使机器人沿地面彩色引导线自主运动,并能在适时离线执行任务后自动返航,提出了一种用可编程逻辑器件(CPLD)实现的视觉伺服PID控制方法.该方法利用图像特征反馈对其所跟踪的路经进行实时识别跟踪.仿真结果表明,该方法改善了控制算法的实时性,提高了移动机器人的路径跟踪精度与速度.     

Neural network-based adaptive controller design of roboticmanipulators with an observer

A neural network (NN)-based adaptive controller with an observer is proposed for the trajectory tracking of robotic manipulators with unknown dynamics nonlinearities. It is assumed that the robotic manipulator has only joint angle position measurements. A linear observer is used to estimate the robot joint angle velocity, while NNs are employed to further improve the control performance of the controlled system through approximating the modified robot dynamics function. The adaptive controller for robots with an observer can guarantee the uniform ultimate bounds of the tracking errors and the observer errors as well as the bounds of the NN weights. For performance comparisons, the conventional adaptive algorithm with an observer using linearity in parameters of the robot dynamics is also developed in the same control framework as the NN approach for online approximating unknown nonlinearities of the robot dynamics. Main theoretical results for designing such an observer-based adaptive controller with the NN approach using multilayer NNs with sigmoidal activation functions, as well as with the conventional adaptive approach using linearity in parameters of the robot dynamics are given. The performance comparisons between the NN approach and the conventional adaptation approach with an observer is carried out to show the advantages of the proposed control approaches through simulation studies     

A switched-system approach to formation control and heading consensus for multi-robot systems

This paper proposes a novel, hybrid and decentralized, switched-system approach for formation and heading consensus control of mobile robots under switching communication topology, including collision avoidance capability. The set of robots consists of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots and can include a teleoperated UAV. The key feature of this approach is a virtual graph, which is derived by adding a set of relative translation vectors to the real graph of the multiple robots. Our approach results in the robots in the real graph moving to the desired formation and achieving heading consensus while the virtual robots on the virtual graph reach pose consensus. If any robot detects a nearby obstacle or other robot, the robot will temporarily move along an avoidance vector, which is perpendicular and positively projected onto the attractive vector, such that collision is avoided while minimally deviating from its formation control path. Experimental results are provided by two different research groups to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. These experiments extend the theoretical development by introducing a teleoperated quadrotor as a leader robot of the multi-robot systems. The same control law works for the extended system, with no modifications.     

Incremental online sparsification for model learning in real-time robot control

For many applications such as compliant, accurate robot tracking control, dynamics models learned from data can help to achieve both compliant control performance as well as high tracking quality. Online learning of these dynamics models allows the robot controller to adapt itself to changes in the dynamics (e.g., due to time-variant nonlinearities or unforeseen loads). However, online learning in real-time applications - as required in control - cannot be realized by straightforward usage of off-the-shelf machine learning methods such as Gaussian process regression or support vector regression. In this paper, we propose a framework for online, incremental sparsification with a fixed budget designed for fast real-time model learning. The proposed approach employs a sparsification method based on an independence measure. In combination with an incremental learning approach such as incremental Gaussian process regression, we obtain a model approximation method which is applicable in real-time online learning. It exhibits competitive learning accuracy when compared with standard regression techniques. Implementation on a real Barrett WAM robot demonstrates the applicability of the approach in real-time online model learning for real world systems.     

Stable adaptive controller design of robotic manipulators via neuro‐fuzzy dynamic inversion

In this paper, a stable adaptive control approach is developed for the trajectory tracking of a robotic manipulator via neuro‐fuzzy (NF) dynamic inversion, an inverse model constructed by the dynamic neuro‐fuzzy (DNF) model with desired dynamics. The robot neuro‐fuzzy model is initially built in the Takagi‐Sugeno (TS) fuzzy framework with both structure and parameters identified through input/output (I/O) data from the robot control process, and then employed to dynamically approximate the whole robot dynamics rather than its nonlinear components as is done by static neural networks (NNs) through parameter learning algorithm. Since the NF dynamic inversion comprises a cluster of reference trajectories connecting the initial state to the desired state of the robot, the dynamic performance in the initial control stage of robot trajectory tracking can be guaranteed by choosing the optimum reference trajectory. Furthermore, the assumption that the robot states should be on a compact set can be excluded by NF dynamic inversion design. The system stability and the convergence of tracking errors are guaranteed by Lyapunov stability theory, and the learning algorithm for the DNF system is obtained thereby. Finally, the viability and effectiveness of the proposed control approach are illustrated through comparing with the dynamic NN (DNN) based control approach. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

A modular approach to learning manipulation strategies from human demonstration

Object manipulation is a challenging task for robotics, as the physics involved in object interaction is complex and hard to express analytically. Here we introduce a modular approach for learning a manipulation strategy from human demonstration. Firstly we record a human performing a task that requires an adaptive control strategy in different conditions, i.e. different task contexts. We then perform modular decomposition of the control strategy, using phases of the recorded actions to guide segmentation. Each module represents a part of the strategy, encoded as a pair of forward and inverse models. All modules contribute to the final control policy; their recommendations are integrated via a system of weighting based on their own estimated error in the current task context. We validate our approach by demonstrating it, both in a simulation for clarity, and on a real robot platform to demonstrate robustness and capacity to generalise. The robot task is opening bottle caps. We show that our approach can modularize an adaptive control strategy and generate appropriate motor commands for the robot to accomplish the complete task, even for novel bottles.     

Task-space neuro-sliding mode control of robot manipulators under Jacobian uncertainties

Cartesian robot control is an appealing scheme because it avoids the computation of inverse kinematics, in contrast to joint robot control approach. For tracking, high computational load is typically required to obtain Cartesian robot dynamics. In this paper, an alternative approach for Cartesian tracking is proposed under assumption that robot dynamics is unknown and the Jacobian are uncertain. A neuro-sliding second order mode controller delivers a low dimensional neural network, which roughly estimates inverse robot dynamics, and an inner smooth control loop guarantees exponential tracking. Experimental results are presented to confirm the performance in a real time environment.     

Obstacle avoidance for redundant robots using configuration control

The article presents a new and simple solution to the obstacle avoidance problem for redundant robots. In the proposed approach, called configuration control, the redundancy is utilized to configure the robot so as to satisfy a set of kinematic inequality constraints representing obstacle avoidance, while the end-effector is tracking a desired trajectory. The robot control scheme is very simple, and uses on-line adaptation to eliminate the need for the complex dynamic model and parameter values of the robot. Several simulation results for a four-link planar robot are presented to illustrate the versatility of the approach. These include reaching around a stationary obstacle, simultaneous avoidance of two obstacles, robot reconfiguration to avoid a moving obstacle, and avoidance of rectangular obstacles. The simplicity and computational efficiency of the proposed scheme allows on-line implementation with a high sampling rate for real-time obstacle avoidance in a dynamically varying environment.