This paper deals with Reconfigurable Cable-Driven Parallel Robots (RCDPRs). A RCDPR is able to change the locations of its cable exit points, the latter being defined as the connection points between the cables and the robot base frame. Given a RCDPR, a set of possible reconfigurations, a desired platform path and a description of the robot environment, the reconfiguration strategy proposed in this paper selects the optimal configurations to be associated to each point of the desired path. The selection of the optimal configurations can be performed with respect to several criteria such as the number of configuration changes, the number of cable reconfigurations and the robot stiffness. In this paper, the optimization is performed using a Dijkstra's based algorithm.

This paper presents the preliminary studies dedicated to the design of cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) for industrial purposes. The goal is to transport the proper tools around a jacket, an offshore structure supporting a wind turbine, in order to perform painting and sandblasting tasks. In this paper, a simplified case study consisting of a structure composed of four tubes is investigated. A fully constrained CDPR and a suspended CDPR are studied. The design problems of the CDPRs at hand are formulated as optimization problems. They aim at determining the locations of the base anchor points of the cables that minimize the size of the CDPR, while satisfying a set of constraints. Those constraints guarantee that the moving platform can support the external wrenches and that there is no interference between the cables and between the cables and the environment, all along the path to be followed by the moving platform.

Electric fish feel the perturbations of a self-generated electric field through their electro-receptive skin. This sense allows them to navigate and reconstruct their environment in conditions where vision and sonar cannot work. In this article, we use a sensor bio-inspired from this active sense to address the problem of small objects reconstruction and electrolocation. Based on a Kalman filter, any small object in the surrounding of the motion controlled sensor can be encapsulated into an equivalent sphere whose location is well estimated by the filter. Experimental results illustrate the feasibility of the approach.

Morphology, perception and locomotion are three key features highly inter-dependent in robotics. This paper gives an overview of an underwater modular robotic platform equipped with a bio-inspired electric sense. The platform is reconfigurable in the sense that it can split into independent rigid modules and vice-versa. Composed of 9 modules, the longer entity can swim like an eel over long distances, while once detached, each of its modules is efficient for small displacements with a high accuracy. Challenges are to mechanically ensure the morphology changes and to do it automatically. Electric sense is used to guide the modules during docking phases and to navigate in unknown scenes. Several aspects of the design of the robot are described and a particular attention is paid to the inter-module docking system. The feasibility of the design is assessed through experiments.

The aim of this paper is to perform the navigation of an underwater robot equipped with a sensor using the electric sense. The robot navigates in an unbounded environment in presence of spheres. This sensor is inspired of some species of electric fish. A model of this sensor composed of n spherical electrodes is established. The variations of the current due to the presence of the sphere is related to the model of Rasnow. Unscented Kalman Filter is used to localize the robot with respect to the sphere and to estimate the size of the sphere. We show that bio-inspired motions improve the detection of the spheres. We illustrate the efficiency of the method in two cases: a two electrodes sensor and a four electrodes sensor.