Robot audition system can greatly improve the adaptability of mobile robots especially in the case of robot vision system can’t work effectively. So an acoustic localization system using microphone array for mobile robot is proposed in this paper. In order to localize the sound source target, the microphone array used in the system consists of four microphones which were placed respectively on ...

This paper describes the development of a novel humanoid robot ankle based on an orientation Parallel Kinematic Mechanism (PKM) for intelligent and flexible control. With three identical Universal-Prismatic-Spherical prismatic-actuated limbs and a central Universal-Revolute passive limb, the PKM can perform three degrees of freedom rotational motions. In order to enable the humanoid robot safel...

The Dynamic Tensegrity Robotics Lab (DTRL) at the NASA Ames Research center is actively researching the design, control, and locomotion of tensegrity robots for planetary exploration. The advantage of using a tensegrity robot emerges from the fact that it behaves as a structured soft robot. This term, structured soft robotic system, comes from the fact that tensegrity systems are traditionally ...

Amobile robot toy must be designed to be appealing to children, to create interesting and meaningful interactions, and to be capable of facing the wide variety of situations that can be experienced, all at a reasonable cost. In this paper we present Roball, a rolling robot. Children are used to play with ball-shaped objects, making Roball implicitly appealing. A special characteristic of the de...

We consider three related problems of robot movement in arbitrary dimensions: coverage, search, and navigation. For each problem, a spherical robot is asked to accomplish a motion-related task in an unknown environment whose geometry is learned by the robot during navigation. The robot is assumed to have tactile and global positioning sensors. We view these problems from the perspective of (non...

The kinematics problem is defined as the transformation from the Cartesian space to the joint space and vice versa. Both forward and inverse kinematics solutions for the TR 4000 educational robot arm are presented. The closed form solution of the inverse kinematics problem is of utmost importance in controlling robotic manipulator. In this paper, a closed form solution to the inverse kinematics...

Many problems in kinematic synthesis of mechanisms and robots lead naturally to systems of bilinear equations in design parameters. Such systems are typically solved using well-known methods for solutions of systems of polynomial equations, e.g., Dialytic Elimination, Grobner bases, and Polynomial Continuation. This paper presents a new nullspace analysis method for solving a system of bilinear...

We present the Hbot, a holonomic, singularity-free spherical robot designed for haptic simulations. The Hbot is made up of a caged sphere actuated by steered and driven nonholonomic wheels to produce continuous and unlimited spherical motions. We analyse the kinematic interface between a sphere and n arbitrarily positioned, steered and driven non-holonomic wheels in the general case. We also pr...

The influence of broken structural homology, and the implied broken dynamical homology, is examined for the Fundamental Plane (FP). Requiring a symmetrical treatment of the FP variables, a bisector method of linear regression was applied, in 3-dimensions, to derive the best FP. A bootstrapping procedure has been used to estimate the uncertainties associated with the slope of the FP. For 25 E an...