Some theoretical and experimental studies have been developed to obtain independent equipment for inspection and maintenace of electric and communication lines, allowing to increase the efficiency of the process and to reduce the risk of accidents with the employees who execute the task. This activity is perfectly adequate for mobile robots because they are capable to move in avoiding the exist...

Traditional cable robots derive their manipulation capabilities using spooling winches at fixed base locations. In our previous work, we examined enhancing manipulation capabilities of cable robots by the addition of base mobility to spooling winches (allowing a group of mobile robots to cooperatively manipulate a payload using cables). Base mobility facilitated the regulation of the tension-di...

Cable suspended robots support a moving platform (MP) in space by several spatially arranged cables with computer-controlled winches. The winches are mounted on base platform (BP). Compared to conventional robots, it is possible to control not only the translational motion of the payload but also its orientation in order to perform, for example, loads handling. By this, cable suspended robots c...

A train-like miniature climbing inspection robot for ferromagnetic tubes is presented in this paper. Using magnetic wheels, it climbs in tubes of 25 mm of diameter and bigger in any orientation, and pass bends with curvatures above 150 mm in some cases. It has embedded electronics and energy, and can transmit images through a cable. Applications are in tubes inspections as found in power plant ...

A proportional-derivative (PD) control with on-line gravity compensation is proposed for regulation tasks of robot manipulators with elastic joints. The work extends a previous PD control with constant gravity compensation at the desired configuration. The control law requires measuring only position and velocity on the motor side of the elastic joints, while the on-line gravity compensation to...

The compound continuum robot employs both concentric tube components and cable-driven to achieve its complex motions. Nevertheless, the interaction between these causes coupling, which inevitably leads reduced accuracy. Consequently, researchers have been striving mitigate compensate for this coupling-induced error in order enhance overall performance of robot. This paper leverages coupling acc...

Considering an environment containing polygonal obstacles, we address the problem of planning motions for a pair planar robots connected to one another via cable limited length. Much like prior problems with single robot fixed base, straight line-of-sight visibility plays important role. The present paper shows how reduced graph provides natural discretization and captures essential topological...

This paper presents a master-slave system applied to the remote diagnosis from echographic data. The motion of the master manipulator is remotely controlled by a physician and reproduced by a slave robot carrying the echographic probe. The contact force between the probe and the patient is fed back to operator allowing him to have a haptic virtual environment. The innovation of this haptic cont...

This paper studies the kinematics and statics of cable-driven parallel robots with less than six cables, in crane configuration. A geometrico-static model is provided, together with a general procedure aimed at effectively solving, in analytical form, the inverse and direct position problems. The stability of equilibrium is assessed within the framework of a constrained optimization problem, fo...

So-called robot–object Lagrangian systems consist of a class nonsmooth underactuated complementarity systems, with specific structure: an “object” and “robot”. Only the robot is actuated. The object dynamics can thus be controlled only through action contact Lagrange multipliers, which represent interaction forces between object. Juggling, walking, running, hopping machines, robotic that manipu...