Robust Disturbance Observer-Based Adaptive Fuzzy Controller for Pneumatic Muscle Actuators

Author(s):  
Prashant K. Jamwal ◽  
Sheng Quan Xie ◽  
Sean Quigley

Variants of Fuzzy logic controllers (FLC) have been widely used to control the systems characterized by uncertain and ambiguous parameters. Control objectives for such systems become more challenging when they are subjected to uncertain environments. Human-robot interaction is such phenomenon wherein robot control difficulties are further augmented due to human intervention. State of the art of research in FLC has been limited in establishing a trade-off between accuracy and interpretability, since achieving both these performance measures simultaneously is difficult. In the present research, an adaptive FLC has been designed in order to achieve better accuracy and higher interpretability. Supported by another instance of FLC as disturbance observer, the proposed controller has adaptive mechanism specifically designed to alter its parameters. The adaptive FLC has been implemented to control actuation of a pneumatic muscle actuator (PMA). Experimental results show excellent trajectory tracking performance of the PMA in the presence of varying environment.

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
S Davis ◽  
Darwin G Caldwell

As the operation of robotic systems moves away from solely manufacturing environments to arenas where they must operate alongside humans, so the essential characteristics of their design has transformed. A move from traditional robot designs to more inherently safe concepts is required. Studying biological systems to determine how they achieve safe interactions is one approach being used. This then seeks to mimic the ingredients that make this interaction safe in robotics systems. This is often achieved through softness both in terms of a soft fleshy external covering and through motor systems that introduce joint compliance for softer physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI). This has led to the development of new actuators with performance characteristics that at least on a macroscopic level try to emulate the function of organic muscle. One of the most promising among these is the pneumatic Muscle Actuator (pMA). However, as with organic muscle, these soft actuators are more susceptible to damage than many traditional actuators. Whilst organic muscle can regenerate and recover, artificial systems do not possess this ability. This article analyzes how organic muscle is able to operate even after extreme trauma and shows how functionally similar techniques can be used with pMAs.


Author(s):  
Xinmeng Li ◽  
Mamoun Alazab ◽  
Qian Li ◽  
Keping Yu ◽  
Quanjun Yin

AbstractKnowledge graph question answering is an important technology in intelligent human–robot interaction, which aims at automatically giving answer to human natural language question with the given knowledge graph. For the multi-relation question with higher variety and complexity, the tokens of the question have different priority for the triples selection in the reasoning steps. Most existing models take the question as a whole and ignore the priority information in it. To solve this problem, we propose question-aware memory network for multi-hop question answering, named QA2MN, to update the attention on question timely in the reasoning process. In addition, we incorporate graph context information into knowledge graph embedding model to increase the ability to represent entities and relations. We use it to initialize the QA2MN model and fine-tune it in the training process. We evaluate QA2MN on PathQuestion and WorldCup2014, two representative datasets for complex multi-hop question answering. The result demonstrates that QA2MN achieves state-of-the-art Hits@1 accuracy on the two datasets, which validates the effectiveness of our model.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-73
Author(s):  
Sofia Thunberg ◽  
Tom Ziemke

AbstractInteraction between humans and robots will benefit if people have at least a rough mental model of what a robot knows about the world and what it plans to do. But how do we design human-robot interactions to facilitate this? Previous research has shown that one can change people’s mental models of robots by manipulating the robots’ physical appearance. However, this has mostly not been done in a user-centred way, i.e. without a focus on what users need and want. Starting from theories of how humans form and adapt mental models of others, we investigated how the participatory design method, PICTIVE, can be used to generate design ideas about how a humanoid robot could communicate. Five participants went through three phases based on eight scenarios from the state-of-the-art tasks in the RoboCup@Home social robotics competition. The results indicate that participatory design can be a suitable method to generate design concepts for robots’ communication in human-robot interaction.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (22) ◽  
pp. 6529
Author(s):  
Masaya Iwasaki ◽  
Mizuki Ikeda ◽  
Tatsuyuki Kawamura ◽  
Hideyuki Nakanishi

Robotic salespeople are often ignored by people due to their weak social presence, and thus have difficulty facilitating sales autonomously. However, for robots that are remotely controlled by humans, there is a need for experienced and trained operators. In this paper, we suggest crowdsourcing to allow general users on the internet to operate a robot remotely and facilitate customers’ purchasing activities while flexibly responding to various situations through a user interface. To implement this system, we examined how our developed remote interface can improve a robot’s social presence while being controlled by a human operator, including first-time users. Therefore, we investigated the typical flow of a customer–robot interaction that was effective for sales promotion, and modeled it as a state transition with automatic functions by accessing the robot’s sensor information. Furthermore, we created a user interface based on the model and examined whether it was effective in a real environment. Finally, we conducted experiments to examine whether the user interface could be operated by an amateur user and enhance the robot’s social presence. The results revealed that our model was able to improve the robot’s social presence and facilitate customers’ purchasing activity even when the operator was a first-time user.


2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-566 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Duchaine ◽  
◽  
Clément Gosselin ◽  

While the majority of industrial manipulators currently in use only need to performautonomousmotion, future generations of cooperative robots will also have to execute cooperative motion and intelligently react to contacts. These extended behaviours are essential to enable safe and effective physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI). However, they will inevitably result in an increase of the controller complexity. This paper presents a single variable admittance control scheme that handles the three modes of operation, thereby minimizing the complexity of the controller. First, the adaptative admittance controller previously proposed by the authors for cooperative motion is recalled. Then, a novel implementation of variable admittance control for the generation of smooth autonomous motion including reaction to collisions anywhere on the robot is presented. Finally, it is shown how the control equations for these three modes of operation can be simply unified into a unique control scheme.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (04) ◽  
pp. 1442005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Youngho Lee ◽  
Young Jae Ryoo ◽  
Jongmyung Choi

With the development of computing technology, robots are now popular in our daily life. Human–robot interaction is not restricted to a direct communication between them. The communication could include various different human to human interactions. In this paper, we present a framework for enhancing the interaction among human–robot-environments. The proposed framework is composed of a robot part, a user part, and the DigiLog space. To evaluate the proposed framework, we applied the framework into a real-time remote robot-control platform in the smart DigiLog space. We are implementing real time controlling and monitoring of a robot by using one smart phone as the robot brain and the other smart phone as the remote controller.


Robotics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Mehdi Hellou ◽  
Norina Gasteiger ◽  
Jong Yoon Lim ◽  
Minsu Jang ◽  
Ho Seok Ahn

Personalization and localization are important when developing social robots for different sectors, including education, industry, healthcare or restaurants. This allows for an adjustment of robot behaviors according to the needs, preferences or personality of an individual when referring to personalization or to the social conventions or the culture of a country when referring to localization. However, there are different models that enable personalization and localization presented in the current literature, each with their advantages and drawbacks. This work aims to help researchers in the field of social robotics by reviewing and analyzing different papers in this domain. We specifically focus our review by exploring different robots that employ distinct models for the adaptation of the robot to its environment. Additionally, we study an array of methods used to adapt the nonverbal and verbal skills of social robots, including state-of-the-art techniques in artificial intelligence.


Robotics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 113
Author(s):  
Diogo Carneiro ◽  
Filipe Silva ◽  
Petia Georgieva

Catching flying objects is a challenging task in human–robot interaction. Traditional techniques predict the intersection position and time using the information obtained during the free-flying ball motion. A common pain point in these systems is the short ball flight time and uncertainties in the ball’s trajectory estimation. In this paper, we present the Robot Anticipation Learning System (RALS) that accounts for the information obtained from observation of the thrower’s hand motion before the ball is released. RALS takes extra time for the robot to start moving in the direction of the target before the opponent finishes throwing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first robot control system for ball-catching with anticipation skills. Our results show that the information fused from both throwing and flying motions improves the ball-catching rate by up to 20% compared to the baseline approach, with the predictions relying only on the information acquired during the flight phase.


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