Omni directional mobile robots have been popularly employed in several applications especially in soccer player robots considered in Robocup competitions. However, Omni directional navigation system, Omni-vision system and solenoid kicking mechanism in such mobile robots have not ever been combined. This situation brings the idea of a robot with no head direction into existence, a comprehensi...

Because of the quickly growing demand to handle micro-and nanostructures, micro-and nanorobotics has become an active eld of research in the last years. One major problem of this new technology is how to build a sensor system that can control the robot motion within the required accuracy. For the micro and nano domain we speciied an accuracy of one micron and ten nanometers respectively. We emp...

A mechatronic system based on the micro-macro-kinematic consists of an industrial robot and a piezoelectric stage mounted on the robot’s end-effector and has to carry out operations like micro-assembly or micro-milling. The piezoelectric stage has to compensate the positioning error of the robot. Therefore, the position of the robot’s end-effector has to be measured with high accuracy. This pap...

Optical micro parts, such as glass fibres, require handling and alignment accuracies down to the sub micrometer range. Addressing this task, one aim of the Fraunhofer IPT is the development of new concepts of active gripper systems. In this context a highly integrated, adaptive, rugged and economical gripper system particularly for accurate handling and alignment of flexible micro parts down to...

We present a task-centered formal analysis of the relative power several robot designs, inspired by unique properties and constraints micro-scale robotic systems. Our task interest is object manipulation because it fundamental prerequisite for more complex applications such as assembly or cell manipulation. Motivated difficulty in observing controlling agents at micro-scale, we focus on design ...

In this paper, we studied numerically both kinematic and dynamic models of a biologically inspired mammal-like octopod robot walking with a tetrapod gait. Three different nonlinear oscillators were used to drive the robot’s legs working as central pattern generators. In addition, also a new, relatively simple and efficient model was proposed and investigated. The introduced model of the gait ge...

Robotic Autonomy is a seven-week, hands-on introduction to robotics designed for high school students. The course presents a broad survey of robotics, beginning with mechanism and electronics and ending with robot behavior, navigation and remote teleoperation. During the summer of 2002, Robotic Autonomy was taught to twenty eight students at Carnegie Mellon West in cooperation with NASA/Ames (M...