This paper presents a new software tool, namely RoboClass, to include and manage realistic robots and elements of the environment in Matlab simulations. These elements are loaded from CAD models using an STL-file and can be as detailed as desired. All the steps involved in the process are explained in detail. Furthermore, two illustrative examples are considered to show the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed approach: the ABB-IRB120 industrial robot and the CSA research robot. The developed tool is especially useful both for robotics research and teaching.

This paper presents a control architecture readily suitable for surface treatment tasks such as polishing, grinding, finishing or deburring as carried out by a human operator, with the added benefit of accuracy, recurrence and physical strength as administered by a robotic manipulator partner. The shared strategy effectively couples the human operator propioceptive abilities and fine skills through his interactions with the autonomous physical agent. The novel proposed control scheme is based on task prioritization and a non-conventional sliding mode control, which is considered to benefit from its inherent robustness and low computational cost. The system relies on two force sensors, one located between the last link of the robot and the surface treatment tool, and the other located in some place of the robot end-effector: the former is used to suitably accomplish the conditioning task, while the latter is used by the operator to manually guide the robotic tool. When the operator chooses to cease guiding the tool, the robot motion safely switches back to an automatic reference tracking. The paper presents the theories for the novel collaborative controller, whilst its effectiveness for robotic surface treatment is substantiated by experimental results using a redundant 7R manipulator and a mock-up conditioning tool.

The paper presents the developing of a new robotic system for the administration of a highly sophisticated therapy to stroke patients. This therapy is able to maximize patient motivation and involvement in the therapy and continuously assess the progress of the recovery from the functional viewpoint. Current robotic rehabilitation systems do not include patient information on the control loop. The main novelty of the presented approach is to close patient in the loop and use multisensory data (such as pulse, skin conductance, skin temperature, position, velocity, etc.) to adaptively and dynamically change complexity of the therapy and real-time displays of a virtual reality system in accordance with specific patient requirements. First, an analysis of subject's physiological responses to different tasks is presented with the objective to select the best candidate of physiological signals to estimate the patient physiological state during the execution of a virtual rehabilitation task. Then, the design of a prototype of multimodal robotic platform is defined and developed to validate the scientific value of the proposed approach.

This paper describes a multimodal interface that combines ocular information, through electrooculography, and haptics information, with a desktop-based haptics feedback device. Two control strategies are defined in order to test the advantages of multimodal interaction with an external device, in this case a robot arm from Fanuc. Three applications have been designed using the previously described control strategies. These applications are aimed at studying the usefulness of this kind of interfaces as a substitute of classical man-machine devices.

This paper presents a microdevice for the monitoring, control and management of electric loads at home. The key idea is to compact the electronic design as much as possible in order to install it inside a schuko socket. Moreover, the electronic schuko socket (electronic microdevice+schuko socket) has the feature of communicating with a central unit and with other microdevices over the existing powerlines. Using the existing power lines the proposed device can be installed in new buildings or the old ones. The main use of this device is to monitoring, control and management of electric loads to save energy and to prevent accidents produced by the different kind of devices (for instance, iron) used in domestic tasks.

Abstract In this paper parallelization and segmentation methodologies are used to obtain a real‐time (RT) implementation of computationally expensive estimators or filters in an FPGA. First, the filter to be applied is briefly described, and afterwards its hardware structure and VHDL implementation are indicated. A comparative study is performed between the FPGA parallelized implementation and the implementation in a sequential processor. The analysis proves that the execution times measured on the FPGA are considerably lower, making that implementation valid for its use in RT systems. Moreover, several experimental results are shown for a visual servoing application in order to evidence the good performance of the proposed algorithms and implementations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper presents a new bilateral control scheme for time-delayed teleoperation designed to achieve transparency. The control scheme allows that the slave follows the master in spite of the time delay, ant that the force displayed to the operator was exactly the reaction force from the environment. In addition, the interaction force of the slave with the environment is adapted to the master/slave ratio when it is reflected to the operator, improving the transparency of the system. The bilateral control scheme can be used in contact situations or non-contact situations of the slave with the environment. Together with the control scheme, the paper describes an analytical design method that allows the obtaining of the control gains.

In the recent past, the visibility problem in vision-based control has been widely investigated. The proposed solutions generally have a common goal: to always keep the object in the camera's field of view during the visual servoing. Contrary to this solution, we propose a new approach based on the concept of allowing the changes of visibility in image features during the control task. To this aim, the camera invariant visual-servoing approach has been redefined in order to take into account the changes of visibility in image features. A new smooth task function using weighted features is presented, and a continuous control law is obtained starting from it by imposing its exponential decrease to zero. Furthermore, the local stability analysis of the invariant visual-servoing approach with weighted features is presented. Finally, this promising way of dealing with the visibility issue has been successfully tested with an eye-in-hand robotic system.

This paper presents a visual tracking system developed for a teleoperation project. The goal of this project is a both hands master-slave system in which the operator needs to see the robot hand (gripper) every time. For this reason, a new and robust algorithm to track the robot hand during its movement is developed. This is a model based tracking so the knowledge of the robot hand CAD model is needed (pose is obtained). This information is used to move a pan-tilt camera and keep the gripper centered in the image using an adaptive fuzzy logic controller. Due to the continuous gripper movement, we need a position predictor to reduce the error. In our case, the extended Kalman filter - EKF is used to do it. Vision based systems have a lot of empirically adjustable parameters for a good working. With the algorithm proposed in this paper, some parameters are auto-adjustable, so the system is easier to use and the robustness is increased.