Dynamic compensation by fusing a high-speed actuator and high-speed visual feedback with its application to fast peg-and-hole alignment

This paper presents a dynamic compensation concept to grapple with the dynamic defects of a traditional robot arm, especially while performing high-speed endpoint regulations. The proposed high-speed dynamic compensation concept offers a new point of view for cooperating with a traditional manipulator to realize highly dexterous performance of manipulations. The concept is realized through adoption of a high-speed light-weight actuator as well as endpoint closed loop configured high-speed cameras. The dynamic compensation is analyzed experimentally with 1000 Hz visual feedback and a high-speed finger for a robot arm in the case of one degree of freedom. The advantage of the proposed approach is that the modeling for the robot system’s dynamics is not needed, whereas it is necessary and trivial in order to realize high-speed regulations by traditional approaches. Thus, the control issue becomes easier with the proposed approach. As an application for this concept, fast peg-and-hole alignment with large position and attitude uncertainty is studied. The alignment algorithm is based on a visual compliance strategy. Alignment experiments show that with the proposed concept of dynamic compensation as well as visual compliant motion control, robust and fast convergence was realized for most cases.     

Angular resolution of the Ohya air shower detector

Accurate measurements of the total number of muons in an air shower are important for the discrimination of showers produced by astronomical gamma rays from those produced by protons. In order to perform this discrimination, muon detectors with a total area of about 400 m² have been constructed in the Ohya stone mine. At ground level, scintillation detectors have been distributed for determining the total number of electrons in the air shower. The arrival direction of the air shower determined by usual timing information was examined using independent data on the arrival direction determined by muons in the shower. The angular resolution thus obtained at the shower maximum is 1.7° in the south-north plane and 2° in the east-west plane. The difference of the resolution is due to the asymmetric arrangement of scintillation detectors.     

Element by element a posteriori error estimation and improvement of stress solutions for two-dimensional elastic problems

A quantitative method of a posteriori error estimation based on finite element solutions is developed. The proposed method can estimate the error of solutions obtained by the finite element method for two-dimensional elastic problems with 4-node elements. Since the error is estimated element by element, the proposed method does not require a large memory or long computing time. Not only rectangular elements but also arbitrarily shaped 4-node elements can be used in this method for estimating the error in the finite element computation with high accuracy. The finite element solutions are improved by adding the estimated errors onto the original solutions. The proposed method can be utilized for any type of linear problem if an isoparametric finite element method is used.     

COMPUTATIONAL METHODS THROUGH GENETIC ALGORITHMS FOR OBTAINING STACKELBERG SOLUTIONS TO TWO-LEVEL MIXED ZERO-ONE PROGRAMMING PROBLEMS

In this paper, we develop computational methods for obtaining Stackelberg solutions to two-level mixed zero-one programming problems in which the decision maker at the upper level controls zero-one variables and the decision maker at the lower level controls real variables. To illustrate two-level mixed zero-one programming problems, we formulate a facility location and transportation problem as a two-level mixed zero-one programming problem. We develop computational methods through genetic algorithms for obtaining Stackelberg solutions. To demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed methods, computational experiments are carried out and comparisons between the methods based on the branch-and-bound techniques and the proposed methods are provided.     

Inchworm robot grippers for clothes manipulation

Manipulating deformable objects like clothes, plastic, and paper by a robot is very challenging. This paper focuses on clothes manipulation as an example. A tracing manipulation method is used here to find a corner of the clothes. In this paper, tracing refers to tracing the clothes’ edge, with the robot’s movement based on feedback from sensors. One difficulty during this edge tracing is to make the robot trace smoothly and speedily without dropping the clothes in the process. This is due to the fact that deformable objects are sensitive to contact forces. A solution to this problem is to design a special robot gripper that can trace the clothes without having to worry about the clothes slipping away. In this paper, the development of inchworm-type grippers is proposed. Two sets of grippers inside a robot hand will allow the robot to trace the clothes more freely because there will always be a gripper firmly holding the clothes at any time. A unique tracing method for towel spreading using the inchworm grippers is also discussed. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of both the proposed grippers and also the algorithm. This work was presented in part at the 12th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 25–27, 2007     

Magnification-type x-ray imaging system: optimum design and image restoration

A magnification-type x-ray imaging system, that is, an x-ray microscope, is evaluated by taking into account the partial coherency of the illumination of the objects. The transfer characteristic proposed in an earlier paper [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 1, 11 (1984)] is used for the evaluation, and based on the results, an optimum design for a high-resolution x-ray imaging system is discussed. The image restoration method for this system is also shown.     

Evaluation of vibration in many positions by SOM

We propose a method of evaluating the vibration of motor-operated electric tools (MOETs) by using a self-organizing feature map (SOM). The vibration spectrum is used to evaluate the MOET vibration. These vibration spectra are derived from 18 vibration data obtained by measurements on three different positions of a MOET. The spectra are then sent to the SOM network for the calculations. The vibration spectra are classified by the SOM, and calculations give the Euclidean distance from the weight vector in order to develop a quantitative evaluation. A statistic analysis of the Euclidean distance allows a quantitative evaluation of a MOET with respect to vibration stress and other relevant parameters.This work was presented, in part, at the 9th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 28–30, 2004     

ARSlice: Head-Mounted Display Augmented with Dynamic Tracking and Projection

Computed tomography (CT) generates cross-sectional images of the body. Visualizing CT images has been a challenging problem. The emergence of the augmented and virtual reality technology has provided promising solutions. However, existing solutions suffer from tethered display or wireless transmission latency. In this paper, we present ARSlice, a proof-of-concept prototype that can visualize CT images in an untethered manner without wireless transmission latency. Our ARSlice prototype consists of two parts, the user end and the projector end. By employing dynamic tracking and projection, the projector end can track the user-end equipment and project CT images onto it in real time. The user-end equipment is responsible for displaying these CT images into the 3D space. Its main feature is that the user-end equipment is a pure optical device with light weight, low cost, and no energy consumption. Our experiments demonstrate that our ARSlice prototype provides part of six degrees of freedom for the user, and a high frame rate. By interactively visualizing CT images into the 3D space, our ARSlice prototype can help untrained users better understand that CT images are slices of a body.     

Nonlinear adaptive control system design and experiment for a 3-DOF model helicopter

This paper deals with model following control of a model helicopter with three degree-of-freedom. Since the decoupling matrix is singular, a nonlinear structure algorithm is used to design the controller. Furthermore, since the model dynamics are described linearly by unknown system parameters, a well-known parameter estimation technique is introduced. The integral type of estimation model is proposed here since the use of the derivative type of model cannot obtain the desired estimation result. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method. This work was presented in part at the 13th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 31–February 2, 2008