Quadrotors are coming up as an attractive platform for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research, due to the simplicity of their structure and maintenance, their ability to hover, and their vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capability. With the vast advancements in small-size sensors, actuators and processors, researches are now focusing on developing mini UAV’s to be used in both research and ...

This paper applies dimensional synthesis to explore the geometric design of dexterous three-fingered robotic hands for maximizing precision manipulation workspace, in which the hand stably moves an object with respect to the palm of the hand, with contacts only on the fingertips. We focus primarily on the tripod grasp, which is the most commonly used grasp for precision manipulation. We systema...

Fast human walking includes a phase where the stance heel rises from the ground and the stance foot rotates about the stance toe. This phase where the biped becomes under-actuated is not present during the walk of humanoid robots. The objective of this study is to determine if this phase is useful to reduce the energy consumed in the walking. In order to study the efficiency of this phase, six ...

In recent years, underactuated nonlinear dynamic systems trajectory tracking, such as space robots and manipulators with structural flexibility, has become a major field of interest due to the complexity and high computational load of these systems. Hierarchical sliding mode control has been investigated recently for these systems; however, the instability phenomena will possibly occur, especia...

in this paper the design of a biped robot actuated with shape memory alloy (sma) springs with minimum degrees of freedom is presented. sma springs are a class of smart materials that are known for their high power to mass and volume ratios. it was shown that utilizing spring type of smas have many advantages as large deformation, smooth motion, silent and clean movement compared to ordinary typ...