Cable transmission enables motors of robotic arm to operate lightweight and low-inertia joints remotely in various environments, but it also creates issues with motion coupling and cable routing that can reduce arm's control precision and performance. In this paper, we present a novel motion decoupling mechanism with low-friction to align the cables and efficiently transmit the motor's power. By arranging these mechanisms at the joints, we fabricate a fully decoupled and lightweight cable-driven robotic arm called D3-Arm with all the electrical components be placed at the base. Its 776 mm length moving part boasts six degrees of freedom (DOF) and only 1.6 kg weights. To address the issue of cable slack, a cable-pretension mechanism is integrated to enhance the stability of long-distance cable transmission. Through a series of comprehensive tests, D3-Arm demonstrated 1.29 mm average positioning error and 2.0 kg payload capacity, proving the practicality of the proposed decoupling mechanisms in cable-driven robotic arm.

Autonomous navigation of vehicle-trailer systems is crucial in environments like airports, supermarkets, and concert venues, where various types of trailers are needed to navigate with different payloads and conditions. However, accurately modeling such systems remains challenging, especially for trailers with castor wheels. In this work, we propose a novel universal vehicle-trailer navigation system that integrates a hybrid nominal kinematic model—combining classical nonholonomic constraints for vehicles and neural network-based trailer kinematics—with a lightweight online residual learning module to correct real-time modeling discrepancies and disturbances. Additionally, we develop a model predictive control framework with a weighted model combination strategy that improves long-horizon prediction accuracy and ensures safer motion planning. Our approach is validated through extensive real-world experiments involving multiple trailer types and varying payload conditions, demonstrating robust performance without manual tuning or trailer-specific calibration.

Flexible cable-driven robotic arms (FCRAs) offer dexterous and compliant motion. Still, the inherent properties of cables, such as resilience, hysteresis, and friction, often lead to particular difficulties in modeling and control. This paper proposes a model predictive control (MPC) method that relies exclusively on input-output data, without a physical model, to improve the control accuracy of FCRAs. First, we develop an implicit model based on input-output data and integrate it into an MPC optimization framework. Second, a data selection algorithm (DSA) is introduced to filter the data that best characterize the system, thereby reducing the solution time per step to approximately 4 ms, which is an improvement of nearly 80%. Lastly, the influence of hyperparameters on tracking error is investigated through simulation. The proposed method has been validated on a real FCRA platform, including five-point positioning accuracy tests, a five-point response tracking test, and trajectory tracking for letter drawing. The results demonstrate that the average positioning accuracy is approximately 2.070 mm. Moreover, compared to the PID method with an average tracking error of 1.418°, the proposed method achieves an average tracking error of 0.541°.

Guidance robots that can guide people and avoid various obstacles, could potentially be owned by more visually impaired people at a fairly low cost. Most of the previous guidance robots for the visually impaired ignored the human response behavior and comfort, treating the human as an appendage dragged by the robot, which can lead to imprecise guidance of the human and sudden changes in the traction force experienced by the human. In this paper, we propose a novel quadruped guidance robot system with a comfort-based concept. We design a controllable traction device that can adjust the length and force between human and robot to ensure comfort. To allow the human to be guided safely and comfortably to the target position in complex environments, our proposed human motion planner can plan the traction force with the force-based human motion model. To track the planned force, we also propose a robot motion planner that can generate the specific robot motion command and design the force control device. Our system has been deployed on Unitree Laikago quadrupedal platform and validated in real-world scenarios. (Video11Video demonstration: https://youtu.be/gd-RcYOqGuo.)