We present a virtual learning space station, a design space, which was co-designed by 63 school children from three continents, namely Namibia, Malaysia and Finland. The design space station is developed on the Ohyay platform for children by children to plan, interact and conduct co-design activities. In our hands-on demonstration, attendees can organise/join a design session and test the online collaboration and facilitation tools provided by the space station. Our demo contributes directly to the IMX 2022 theme of “Interactive Media Brings us Together”.

This paper presents a simple and robust approach to achieving collision avoidance for kinematically redundant manipulators at the control-loop level. The proposed scheme represents the obstacle avoidance requirement as inequality constraints in the manipulator workspace, and ensures that these inequalities are satisfied while the end-effector tracks the desired trajectory. The control scheme is the damped-least-squares formulation of the configuration control approach implemented as a kinematic controller. Computer simulation and experimental results are given for a Robotics Research 7 DOF redundant arm and demonstrate the collision avoidance capability for reaching inside a truss structure. These results confirm that the proposed approach provides a simple and effective method for real-time collision avoidance.>

This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time control system with multiple modes of operation for a mobile redundant dexterous manipulator. The manipulator under study is a seven degree-of-freedom (DOF) arm from Robotics Research Corporation, mounted on a motorized platform. The manipulator-plus-platform system has 2-DOF for the task of hand placement and orientation. The redundancy resolution is achieved by accomplishing two additional tasks using the configuration control technique. The system allows a choice of arm angle control or collision avoidance for the seventh task and platform placement or elbow angle control for the eighth task. In addition, joint limit avoidance task is automatically invoked when any of the joints approach their limits. The system is robust to singularities, and also provides the capability of assigning weighting factors to end-effector and redundancy resolution tasks. The motion control algorithms are executed at 1.1 ms on two MC68040 processors in a VME-bus environment running the VxWorks real-time operating system. The paper describes the hardware and software components of the VME environment. Experimental results are also presented.>