Mobile manipulation is a hot area of study in robotics as it unites the two classes of robots: locomotors and manipulators. An emerging niche in the field of mobile manipulation is aerial mobile manipulation. Although there has been a fair amount of study of free-flying satellites with graspers, the more recent trend has been to outfit UAVs with graspers to assist various manipulation tasks. Wh...

In this chapter we explore the concept of low-dimensional posture subspaces for artificial hands. Recent advances in neuroscience research have shown that control of the human hand during grasping is dominated by movement in a configuration space of highly reduced dimensionality. This has led our group to explore how artificial hands may take advantage of similar subspaces to perform complex gr...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease affecting about 1-2% of the population over the age of 65. Individuals with PD experience gradual deterioration of dexterous manipulation for activities of daily living; however, current clinical evaluations are mostly subjective and do not quantify changes in dynamic control of fingertip force that is critical for manual dexte...

Abstract Owing to their light weight, compactness, and good adaptability, soft robots are promising for applications with safe human-machine interactions. Compared traditional rigid robots, the distributed actuation of bodies leads complex nonlinear deformation, making it challenging model its dynamics. In this paper, a Finite Element Method (FEM)-based fast neural network open-loop control met...

Product packaging is one of the key industrial sectors where automation is of paramount interest. Any product going out to the consumer requires some form of packaging, be it food products, gift packaging or the medical supplies. Hence there is continuous demand of high-speed product packaging. This requirement is dramatically increased with seasonal consumer products and fancy gifts, which inv...

Robots successfully manipulate objects in controlled environments. However, they fail in unknown environments. Few years old children lift and manipulate unfamiliar objects more dexterously than today’s robots. Therefore, roboticists are looking for inspiration on neurophysiological studies to improve their robotics control models. We present an artificial intelligence control model for dextero...

Cortico-motoneuronal system and dexterous finger movements To the Editor: A recent paper in the Journal of Neurophys-iology by Sasaki et al. (2004) reports that in macaque monkeys, skilled movements of the digits can survive a large unilateral lesion of the lateral corticospinal tract (LSCT) at the C 5 level. This important report forces us to reconsider our views about the pathways mediating c...

A new robotic platform for natural orifice surgery is described. The robot is designed to carry multiple tool tips in a single end-effector arm. Design and experimental validation are presented. Although the design is still being improved, results suggest that the new robotic tool will enable dexterous abdominal surgery with improved force transmission capability.