An amphibious spherical robot capable of motion on land as well as underwater is developed to implement the complicated underwater operations in our previous research. In order to improve the speed performance of the spherical robot on a slope or comparatively smooth terrains, we propose a new rollerskating mode for the robot by equipping a passive wheel on each leg to implement the roller-skat...

Increasingly researchers are looking outside of normal communication channels (such as video and audio) to provide additional forms of communication or interaction between a human and a robot, or a robot and its environment. Amongst the new channels being investigated are infrared, proprioceptive and temperature sensors to detect touch. Our work aims at developing a system that can detect natur...

Described here is an integrated miniaturised robot with an omnidirectional visual sensor. The hardware consists of a Gumstix computer and an image sensor mounted on a small fast autonomous mobile robot. An experiment follows which demonstrates that a simple omnidirectional vision method produces reliable wall avoiding behaviour in the robot. This work is part of an on-going research project to ...

In this paper, a new design method considering a desired workspace and swing range of spherical joints of a DELTA robot is presented. The design is based on a new concept, which is the maximum inscribed workspace proposed in this paper. Firstly, the geometric description of the workspace for a DELTA robot is discussed, especially, the concept of the maximum inscribed workspace for the robot is ...

In this paper we describe a joint approach for robot navigation with collision avoidance, pose estimation and map building with a 2.5D PMD (Photonic Mixer Device)-Camera combined with a highresolution spherical camera. The cameras are mounted at the front of the robot with a certain inclination angle. The navigation and map building consists of two steps: When entering new terrain the robot fir...

This paper presents a minimalistic robot for playing interactive ball games with human players. It is designed with a realistic entertainment application in mind, being safe, flexible, reasonably cheap, and reactive. This is achieved by a clever, minimalistic robot design with a 2 DOF roll tilt unit that moves a bat with a spherical head. The robot perceives its environment through a stereo cam...

In this paper, trajectory generation for the 4 DOF arm of SURENA III humanoid robot with the purpose of optimizing energy and avoiding a moving obstacle is presented. For this purpose, first, kinematic equations for a seven DOF manipulator are derived. Then, using the Lagrange method, an explicit dynamics model for the arm is developed. In the next step, in order to generate the desired traject...

mobile robot navigation is one of the basic problems in robotics. in this paper, a new approachis proposed for autonomous mobile robot navigation in an unknown environment. the proposedapproach is based on learning virtual parallel paths that propel the mobile robot toward the trackusing a multi-layer, feed-forward neural network. for training, a human operator navigates themobile robot in some...