At first glance, the strategy for generating propulsive impulses for both jumping and swimming in frogs is quite similar. Both modes rely on powerful extension of the hind limbs. However, in Rana esculenta (the semi-aquatic green frog), propulsive impulses for jumping were found to be much larger than those generated during swimming [Nauwelaerts and Aerts, 2003. Propulsive impulses as a covaryi...

This paper addresses the experimental identification of a servo actuator which is used in many industrial applications. Because the system consisted of electrical and mechanical components, the behavior of the system was nonlinear. In addition, the under load behavior of this servo was different. The load torque was considered as the input and a two input-one output model was presented for t...

Time delay is a common phenomenon in robotic systems due to computational requirements and communication properties between or within high-level and low-level controllers as well as the physical constraints of the actuator and sensor. It is widely believed that delays are harmful for robotic systems in terms of stability and performance; however, we propose a different view that the time delay ...

A control synthesis theory was proposed by Horowitz [2] to design a ‘three degrees of freedom’ controller for rate and amplitude constrained systems. Following anti-reset windup techniques, a saturation compensation structure was proposed to design compensators for given linear controllers 131. It is shown here that the compensator can be reformulated in terms of the control synthesis theory. C...

This paper proposes an integrated actuator and sensor active fault-tolerant model predictive control (FTMPC) scheme. In this scheme, fault detection (FD) is implemented by using a set-valued observer, fault isolation (FI) is done by set manipulations and faulttolerant control (FTC) is carried out through the design of a robust model predictive control (MPC) law. In this paper, a set-valued obse...

We have studied a stacked-type electrostatic actuator by folding two ribbon electrodes in an alternate configuration. The energy efficiency of this type of actuator was investigated using the thick-electrode-part actuator and triangle-shaped actuator. The maximum energy efficiency levels were 30–40% for the thick-electrode-part actuator and 40–50% for the triangle-shaped actuator.

This paper proposes a new fault-tolerant control (FTC) method for discrete-time linear parameter varying (LPV) systems using a reconfiguration block. The basic idea of the method is to achieve the FTC goal without redesigning the nominal controller by inserting a reconfiguration block between the plant and the nominal controller. The reconfiguration block is realized by an LPV virtual actuator ...

In this paper, we propose a new model predictive control (MPC) formulation for autonomous driving. The novelty of our formulation stems from the following new results. Firstly, we adopt an alternating minimization approach wherein linear velocities and angular accelerations are alternately optimized. We show that in contrast to the joint formulation, the alternating minimization better exploits...

We provide a comparison of a series of original coordination mechanisms for the distributed boundary coverage problem with a swarm of miniature robots. Our analysis is based on real robot experimentation and models at different levels of abstraction. Distributed boundary coverage is an instance of the distributed coverage problem and has applications such as inspection of structures, de-mining,...