A robot leg with compliant tarsus and its neural control for efficient and adaptive locomotion on complex terrains

Insects, like dung beetles, show fascinating locomotor abilities. They can use their legs to walk on complex terrains (e.g., rocky and curved surfaces) and to manipulate objects. They also exploit their compliant tarsi, increasing the contact area between the legs and surface, to enhance locomotion, and object manipulation efficiency. Besides these biomechanical components, their neural control allows them to move at a proper frequency with respect to their biomechanical properties and to quickly adapt their movements to deal with environmental changes. Realizing these complex achievements on artificial systems remains a grand challenge. As a step towards this direction, we present here our first prototype of an artificial dung beetle-like leg with compliant tarsus by analyzing real dung beetle legs through \(\mu\)CT scans. Compliant tarsus was designed according to the so-called fin ray effect. Real robot experiments show that the leg with compliant tarsus can efficiently move on rocky and curved surfaces. We also apply neural control, based on a central pattern generator (CPG) circuit and synaptic plasticity, to autonomously generate a proper moving frequency of the leg. The controller can also adapt the leg movement to deal with environmental changes, like different treadmill speeds, within a few steps.     

Design and control of a climbing robot based on hot melt adhesion

Robust climbing in unstructured environments has been one of the long-standing challenges in robotics research. Among others, the control of large adhesion forces is still an important problem that significantly restricts the locomotion performance of climbing robots. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a novel approach to autonomous robot climbing which makes use of hot melt adhesion (HMA). The HMA material is known as an economical solution to achieve large adhesion forces, which can be varied by controlling the material temperature. For locomotion on both inclined and vertical walls, this paper investigates the basic characteristics of HMA material, and proposes a design and control of a climbing robot that uses the HMA material for attaching and detaching its body to the environment. The robot is equipped with servomotors and thermal control units to actively vary the temperature of the material, and the coordination of these components enables the robot to walk against the gravitational forces even with a relatively large body weight. A real-world platform is used to demonstrate locomotion on a vertical wall, and the experimental result shows the feasibility and overall performances of this approach.     

Grammatical inference by hill climbing

A cost function is developed, based on information-theoretic concepts, that measures the complexity of a stochastic context-free grammar, as well as the discrepancy between its language and a given stochastic language sample. This function is used to guide a search procedure that finds simple grammars whose languages are good fits to a sample. Reasonable results have been obtained in a variety of cases, including parenthesis and addition strings, Basic English (the first 25 sentences in English Through Pictures) and chain-encoded chromosome boundaries.     

Study on mobile mechanism of a climbing robot for stair cleaning: a translational locomotion mechanism and turning motion

In human living environments, it is often the case that the cleaning area is three-dimensional space such as a high-rise building. An autonomous cleaning robot is proposed so as to move on all floors including stairs in a building. When a robot cleans in three-dimensional space, it needs to turn for direction in addition to climb down stairs. The proposed robot selects movement using legs or wheels depending on stairs or flat surfaces. In this paper, a mobile mechanism and a control method are described for translational locomotion. The translational mechanism is based on using two-wheel-drive type omni-directional mobile mechanism. To recognize a stair using the position-sensitive detector, the robot shifts from translational locomotion to climbing down motion or edge-following motion. It is shown that the proposed robot turns to face a stair with the accuracy of 5°.     

Simulation of constraints by compliant joints

Application of models of compliant (flexible) joints instead of constraint equations for systems with closed-loop kinematic chains is considered; this makes it possible to replace differential-algebraic motion equations by stiff ordinary differential equations. For substantiation of this replacement, methods of analysis of singularly perturbed equations are used. Examples of mathematical models of compliant joints and expressions for approximate Jacobian matrices corresponding to these force interactions are given. Numerical solutions of direct and inverse dynamics equations for a number of controlled mechanisms are used for testing the method and its program realization.     

A magnetic climbing robot to perform autonomous welding in the shipbuilding industry

In this paper we present the mechanical and control design of a magnetic tracked mobile robot. The robot is designed to move on vertical steel ship hulls and to be able to carry 100 kg payload, including its own weight. The mechanical components are presented and the sizing of the magnetic tracks is detailed. All computation is embedded in order to reduce time delays between processes and to keep the robot functional even in case of signal loss with the ground station. The main sensor of the robot is a 2D laser scanner, that gives information on the hull surface and is used for several tasks. We focus on the welding task and expose the control algorithm that allows the robot to follow a straight line for the welding process.     

OmniClimbers: Omni-directional magnetic wheeled climbing robots for inspection of ferromagnetic structures

This paper introduces Omniclimber, a new climbing robot with high maneuverability for inspection of ferromagnetic flat and convex human made structures. In addition to maneuverability, adaptability to various structures with different curvatures and materials are addressed. The conceptual and detailed design of OmniClimbers are presented and two prototypes of the robot are introduced. Several laboratory and field tests are reported, and the results are discussed.     

Buckling of sandwich beams with compliant interfaces

Buckling of elastic sandwich beams is analyzed accounting for the compliance of the interfaces between the skin and core. A relation between tractions and displacement jumps across the interfaces characterizes the interfacial compliance. Timoshenko co-rotational beam elements are used to discretize each layer of the sandwich. The dependence of the bifurcation load on the stiffness of the core and on the interfacial compliance are illustrated by considering examples of a sandwich beam with two sets of boundary conditions. It is shown that the load at bifurcation buckling is sensitive to the compliance of the interfaces and that a sufficiently large interfacial compliance can significantly decrease the bifurcation load.     

Stable running with a two-segment compliant leg

This research presents a two-segment compliant leg model for understanding fast running locomotion of animals and extending to quadruped robot later. We introduce an approach toward a full understanding of the model by investigating the energy of the system and constructing a set of data, called Limit Cycle Set. The set is computed via optimization procedures and includes all the configurations of the model that contribute to its periodic, stable running locomotion. By introducing the creative design of the configurations, the two-segment compliant model is sufficiently general to be extended to other similar two-segment leg models. Along with the computation, we investigate the system stability and discover that it is possible to achieve stability of a compliant leg in real environments with a simple control strategy. The stable motion is successfully validated in real experiments.     

Fast forward planning by guided enforced hill climbing

In recent years, a number of new heuristic search methods have been developed in the field of automated planning. Enforced hill climbing (EHC) is one such method which has been frequently used in a number of AI planning systems. Despite certain weaknesses, such as getting trapped in dead-ends in some domains, this method is more competitive than several other methods in many planning domains. In order to enhance the efficiency of ordinary enforced hill climbing, a new form of enforced hill climbing, called guided enforced hill climbing, is introduced in this paper. An adaptive branch ordering function is the main feature that guided enforced hill climbing has added to EHC. Guided enforced hill climbing expands successor states in the order recommended by the ordering function. Our experimental results in several planning domains show a significant improvement in the efficiency of the enforced hill climbing method, especially when applied to larger problems.     

Toward a human-like biped robot with compliant legs

Conventional models of bipedal walking generally assume rigid body structures, while elastic material properties seem to play an essential role in nature. On the basis of a novel theoretical model of bipedal walking, this paper investigates a model of biped robot which makes use of minimum control and elastic passive joints inspired from the structures of biological systems. The model is evaluated in simulation and a physical robotic platform by analyzing the kinematics and ground reaction force. The experimental results show that, with a proper leg design of passive dynamics and elasticity, an attractor state of human-like walking gait patterns can be achieved through extremely simple control without sensory feedback. The detailed analysis also explains how the dynamic human-like gait can contribute to adaptive biped walking.     

Lip contour segmentation and tracking compliant with lip-reading application constraints

We propose to use both active contours and parametric models for lip contour extraction and tracking. In the first image, jumping snakes are used to detect outer and inner contour key points. These points initialize a lip parametric model composed of several cubic curves that are appropriate to the mouth deformations. According to a combined luminance and chrominance gradient, the initial model is optimized and precisely locked onto the lip contours. On subsequent images, the segmentation is based on the mouth bounding box and key point tracking. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show the effectiveness of the algorithm for lip-reading applications.     

Topology optimization of compliant mechanisms with multiple outputs

A procedure for the topology design of compliant mechanisms with multiple output requirements is presented. Two methods for handling the multiple output requirements are developed, a combined virtual load method and a weighted sum of objectives method. The problem formulations and numerical solution procedures are discussed and illustrated by design examples. The examples illustrate the capabilities of the design procedure, the effect of the direction of the output deflection requirements on the solution, as well as computational issues such as the effect of the starting point and effect of the material resource constraint.     

Cryptanalysis of Enigma double indicators with hill climbing

The Enigma machines were a series of electromechanical rotor cipher machines developed in Germany and used in the first half of the twentieth century to protect commercial, diplomatic, and military communications. Until 1938, the German Army used the so-called double-indicator procedure to transmit Enigma-encoded messages. It was replaced in September 1938 by a new procedure also involving double indicators. Both procedures enabled a team of mathematicians from the Polish Cipher Bureau to recover the wiring of the rotors and to develop cryptanalytic methods for the recovery of the daily keys. The double-indicator procedure was discontinued by the German Army in May 1940, and new methods were developed by the British at Bletchley Park, who were assisted by the knowledge transferred to them by the Polish cryptanalysts. In this article, the authors introduce two new algorithms that build on the historical cryptanalytic attacks on the two variants of the double-indicator procedures. Those attacks are based on hill climbing, divide-and-conquer, and specialized scoring functions, and they can recover the daily key using a number of indicators significantly smaller than the number of indicators required for the historical methods. Unlike the historical methods, the new algorithms produce unique and unambiguous results, including for scenarios with turnover of the middle rotor, and they also fully recover the plugboard settings. With these algorithms we won an international Enigma contest organized in 2015 by the City of Poznan, in memory of the Polish Cipher Bureau mathematicians.     

Design and motion planning of an autonomous climbing robot with claws

This paper presents the design of a novel robot capable of climbing on vertical and rough surfaces, such as stucco walls. Termed CLIBO (claw inspired robot), the robot can remain in position for a long period of time. Such a capability offers important civilian and military advantages such as surveillance, observation, search and rescue and even for entertainment and games. The robot’s kinematics and motion, is a combination between mimicking a technique commonly used in rock climbing using four limbs to climb and a method used by cats to climb on trees with their claws. It uses four legs, each with four-degrees-of-freedom (4-DOF) and specially designed claws attached to each leg that enable it to maneuver itself up the wall and to move in any direction. At the tip of each leg is a gripping device made of 12 fishing hooks and aligned in such a way that each hook can move independently on the wall’s surface. This design has the advantage of not requiring a tail-like structure that would press against the surface to balance its weight. A locomotion algorithm was developed to provide the robot with an autonomous capability for climbing along the pre-designed route. The algorithm takes into account the kinematics of the robot and the contact forces applied on the foot pads. In addition, the design provides the robot with the ability to review its gripping strength in order to achieve and maintain a high degree of reliability in its attachment to the wall. An experimental robot was built to validate the model and its motion algorithm. Experiments demonstrate the high reliability of the special gripping device and the efficiency of the motion planning algorithm.     

Design and analysis of a novel piezoelectric inertial actuator with large stepping displacement amplified by compliant mechanism

Microsystem Technologies - A novel piezoelectric inertial actuator is developed in this paper, to realize the requirements of large stroke and high output displacement accuracy. This proposed...     

Control for minimizing vibrations in systems with compliant elements

A controlled mechanical system containing a compliant element is investigated. Such an element can be, for example, a compliant platform where the operated object (plant) is installed or an elastic gear that connects an engine with this movable object. The control (force or torque) is bounded in magnitude. Only the first (lowest) resonance frequency is taken into account. The system under examination has two degrees of freedom. The linear mathematical model of this system has a double zero eigenvalue and two complex eigenvalues. A control law for this system is designed that steers the plant from the given initial state to a given terminal state in finite time (assuming that there is no damping). The control is divided into intervals on which it varies linearly depending on time or is constant. The time intervals on which the control varies are equal to the period of the natural vibrations of the system. If there is no damping, this makes it possible to completely avoid vibrations on the time intervals where the control is constant.     

Intelligent desktop NC machine tool with compliant motion capability

In this paper, a new desktop NC machine tool with compliance control capability is presented for finishing metallic molds with small curved surface. The NC machine tool consists of three single-axis robots. Tools attached to the tip of the z-axis are ball-end abrasive tools. The control system of the NC machine tool is composed of a force feedback loop, position feedback loop and position feed-forward loop. The force feedback loop controls the polishing force consisting of tool contact force and kinetic friction force. The position feedback loop controls the position in pick feed direction. Further, the position feed-forward loop leads the tool tip along cutter location data. In order to first confirm the application limit of a conventional industrial robot to a finishing task, we evaluate the backlash that causes the position inaccuracy at the tip of an abrasive tool, through a simple position/force measurement. Through a similar measurement and a surface following control experiment along a lens mold, the basic position/force controllability with high resolutions is demonstrated. This work was presented in part at the 13th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 31–February 2, 2008