Well, here we are. You should consider that..
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Denis Diderotand that there is no reason to be afraid of robots (Dr. Isaac Asimov in his Foundation series)
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. Albert Einstein
It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. Richard P. Feynman
The true method of knowledge is experiment. William Blake
There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes. Richard Buckminster Fuller
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, except when required to do so in order to prevent greater harm to humanity itself.unless the Zeroth law comes to play:
A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law or cause greater harm to humanity itself.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law or cause greater harm to humanity itself.
A robot may not harm humanity, or by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Movo Robots (@University of Cassino)
KINOVA MOVO is a robotic manipulation platform that can take on a wide variety of tasks. It has an open hardware with ROS support. It comes with Ethernet, HDMI, USB, and WiFi. MOVO is capable of navigating autonomously right out of the box.
KINOVA MOVO mobile manipulator uses internal map creation to guide its ability to navigate autonomously. The platform contains advanced sensors that provide assisted teleoperation, allowing to drive it without worrying about collisions. The platform is aimed at testing advanced algorithms for human-robot ineraction, mobile manipulation, navigation, cooperative manipulation.
Comau Smart Smart SIX (@University of Salerno)
Dexterous manipulation of objects with two robot hands require a suitable cooperation between the robots. Control of the absolute motion of the object as well as of the internal forces shall be ensured. Also, the interaction bewteen the environment and the object to be manipulated should be taken into account. Coordination of multiple manipulators' systems can provide enhanced capabilities over single arm designs. The Comau Smart SiX is a lightweight industrial six-revolute-joint anthropomorphic manipulator. They are both mounted on a sliding track that adds a further degree of mobility that makes the robot intrinsically redundant. The robots are controlled by a C4G controller equipped with a custom and non modifiable operating system. In order to allow the implementation of advanced control strategies as the one proposed, the C4G are provided with an open version of its operating system that allows the connection with an external PC. Namely, a standard PC, with a real-time variant of the Linux operative system, can totally or partially replace the original C4G controller. Several different operating modes are available, allowing the PC to interact with the original controller both at trajectory generation and at joint control level. In the operating mode used for experiments, the PC is in charge of acquiring data from the resolvers, computing the control algorithm and passing the joint references to the C4G control loops at 2 ms sampling rate. The two robots are connected via Ethernet to the same PC.
Comau Smart 3S (@University of Naples)
Dexterous manipulation of objects with two robot hands require a suitable cooperation between the robots. Control of the absolute motion of the object as well as of the internal forces shall be ensured. Also, the interaction bewteen the environment and the object to be manipulated should be taken into account. A general impedance control scheme was adopted, which encompasses a centralized impedance control strategy aimed at conferring a compliant behavior at the object level, and a decentralized impedance control, enforced at the end-effector level, aimed at avoiding large internal loading of the object. The overall control scheme is based on a two-loops arrangement, where a simple PID inner motion loop is adopted for each manipulator.
- Video: moving a cardbox
Pioneer 3DX (@University of Tennessee)
Multirobot systems can execute missions more efficiently than a single robot or can accomplish tasks not executable by a single one; moreover, they offer increased tolerance to possible vehicle faults, provide flexibility to task execution, and can take the advantages of distributed sensing and actuation. A behavior-based approach, namely the Null-Space-based Behavioral control (NSB), aimed at guiding a mobile robots platoon has been adopted. The approach, using a hierarchy based logic to combine multiple conflicting tasks, is able to fulfill or partially fulfill each task according to their position in the hierarchy. This control technicque was used to perform the decentralized patrolling mission. The basic idea is to define elementary behaviors and then combine them in a consistent way to form a set of high-level actions in the NSB framerwork. The approach was experimented on a setup composed by three Pioneer 3DX robots. They are 0.44 m long, 0.38 m wide, and 0.22 m tall, having a two-wheel drive along with a passive caster, equipped with two rings of sonars (8 front and 8 rear), a SICK laser range-finder, a pan-tilt-zoom color camera, onboard computation on a PC104 stack and Player control software.
Khepera III (@University of Cassino)
The team is composed by 5 Khepera III mobile robots and a base station. Each robot and the base station have on-board a Korebot II board with a basic linux os that allows to execute autonomous navigation algorithms. The default equipment of the robots is composed by several infrared sensors, 5 sonar and a wifi communication device. Moreover, depending on the specific mission, the robots can be equipped with on-board usb webcam, or with an Hokuyo URG Laser Scanner. The robots are used to test decentralized control algorithms for multi-robot systems. In fact, the Null-Space-based Behavioral control (NSB) has been extended to the control of decentralized multi-robot systems.
- Video 1: decentralized formation control
- Video 2: decentralized formation control
Medusa (@Instituto Superior Tecnico Lisboa)
Three Surface marine vehicles (Medusa vehicles) where used to perform the patrolling mission at the Parque Expo site in Lisbon in summer 2011.
The robots were entirely designed and assembled by the staff of the Dynamical Systems and Ocean Robotics Laboratory (DSOR-Lab) of the ISR/IST (Instituto Superior Tecnico/Institute for Systems and Robotics) of Lisbon. They consist of two identical bodies, an upper body and a lower body with diameters and lengths of 0.15m and 1m, respectively. The lower underwater body contains the actuator electronics together with a lithium polymer battery pack that allows, at the nominal speed of 1.0m/s, an autonomy of 6 hours. The upper part contains the processing unit together with navigation sensors (mainly, IMU and GPS). Each robot runs a standard Linux operative system on a 2GHz Intel Core Duo-1GB RAM platform. The architecture adopted allows the use of MatLab both for test and real-time control purposes. The robots are equipped with a GPS localization system. Inter-robot surface and underwater communication are enabled via a Wi-Fi and acoustic modem networks, respectively. The Medusa vehciles were used for the patrolling mission. Patrolling is here interpreted within the framework of the sampling problem. To be applied in practice, several realistic constraints and the time/spatial variance of the information are explicitly taken into account. The proposed approach is well rooted in the concepts of Voronoi tessellations and Gaussian Processes. Each robot, based only on local information, computes the next point to visit according to a given performance criteria.
The robots were entirely designed and assembled by the staff of the Dynamical Systems and Ocean Robotics Laboratory (DSOR-Lab) of the ISR/IST (Instituto Superior Tecnico/Institute for Systems and Robotics) of Lisbon. They consist of two identical bodies, an upper body and a lower body with diameters and lengths of 0.15m and 1m, respectively. The lower underwater body contains the actuator electronics together with a lithium polymer battery pack that allows, at the nominal speed of 1.0m/s, an autonomy of 6 hours. The upper part contains the processing unit together with navigation sensors (mainly, IMU and GPS). Each robot runs a standard Linux operative system on a 2GHz Intel Core Duo-1GB RAM platform. The architecture adopted allows the use of MatLab both for test and real-time control purposes. The robots are equipped with a GPS localization system. Inter-robot surface and underwater communication are enabled via a Wi-Fi and acoustic modem networks, respectively. The Medusa vehciles were used for the patrolling mission. Patrolling is here interpreted within the framework of the sampling problem. To be applied in practice, several realistic constraints and the time/spatial variance of the information are explicitly taken into account. The proposed approach is well rooted in the concepts of Voronoi tessellations and Gaussian Processes. Each robot, based only on local information, computes the next point to visit according to a given performance criteria.
Folaga (@NURC La Spezia)
The Folaga is 2m length and 30Kg weight and with anautonomy of 8 h; it is able to navigate on the sea surface with its own propulsion system; it dives vertically, exploiting ballast and attitude changes. In the surface navigation phase, the vehicle localizes with GPS (Global Positioning System) in addition it may communicate with a land-station through wifi (for short range), dedicated radiomodem link (for medium range) or gprs (for long range) allowing the on-line modification of the mission requirements and real-time data transmission. The motion is due to propulsion jet-pumps or to a propeller at the vehicle stern (both options are available). The diving capability is obtained by combination of a buoyancy change and attitude change through the presence of a ballast chamber. A PC 104 stack with serial line communication capability represents the computing unit. Underwater communication is allowed by WHOI micromodem based on the Texas Instrument TMS320C5416 DSP able to transmit at about 80 bps.
The Folaga vehciles were used for the patrolling mission. Patrolling is here interpreted within the framework of the sampling problem. To be applied in practice, several realistic constraints and the time/spatial variance of the information are explicitly taken into account. The proposed approach is well rooted in the concepts of Voronoi tessellations and Gaussian Processes. Each robot, based only on local information, computes the next point to visit according to a given performance criteria. The scenario used for tests is the Gulf of La Spezia, Italy, and in particular the NATO Undersea Research Center. The experiment was run in February 2012. The volume to patrol is 150×120×4m box 1m below sea level.
The Folaga vehciles were used for the patrolling mission. Patrolling is here interpreted within the framework of the sampling problem. To be applied in practice, several realistic constraints and the time/spatial variance of the information are explicitly taken into account. The proposed approach is well rooted in the concepts of Voronoi tessellations and Gaussian Processes. Each robot, based only on local information, computes the next point to visit according to a given performance criteria. The scenario used for tests is the Gulf of La Spezia, Italy, and in particular the NATO Undersea Research Center. The experiment was run in February 2012. The volume to patrol is 150×120×4m box 1m below sea level.
- Video: Underwater patrolling