Computer Engineering Commons^™

Model Based Force Estimation And Stiffness Control For Continuum Robots, Vincent A. Aloi

Doctoral Dissertations

Continuum Robots are bio-inspired structures that mimic the motion of snakes, elephant trunks, octopus tentacles, etc. With good design, these robots can be naturally compliant and miniaturizable, which makes Continuum Robots ideal for traversing narrow complex environments. Their flexible design, however, prevents us from using traditional methods for controlling and estimating loading on rigid link robots.

In the first thrust of this research, we provided a novel stiffness control law that alters the behavior of an end effector during contact. This controller is applicable to any continuum robot where a method for sensing or estimating tip forces and pose exists. …

Dynamic In Vivo Skeletal Feature Tracking Via Fluoroscopy Using A Human Gait Model, William Patrick Anderson

Doctoral Dissertations

The Tracking Fluoroscope System II, a mobile robotic fluoroscopy platform, developed and built at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, presently employs a pattern matching algorithm in order to identify and track a marker placed upon a subject’s knee joint of interest. The purpose of this research is to generate a new tracking algorithm based around the human gait cycle for prediction and improving the overall accuracy of joint tracking.

This research centers around processing the acquired x-ray images of the desired knee joint obtained during standard clinical operation in order to identify and track directly through the acquired image. Due …

3d Robotic Sensing Of People: Human Perception, Representation And Activity Recognition, Hao Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

The robots are coming. Their presence will eventually bridge the digital-physical divide and dramatically impact human life by taking over tasks where our current society has shortcomings (e.g., search and rescue, elderly care, and child education). Human-centered robotics (HCR) is a vision to address how robots can coexist with humans and help people live safer, simpler and more independent lives.

As humans, we have a remarkable ability to perceive the world around us, perceive people, and interpret their behaviors. Endowing robots with these critical capabilities in highly dynamic human social environments is a significant but very challenging problem in practical …

Modeling, Analysis, And Control Of A Mobile Robot For In Vivo Fluoroscopy Of Human Joints During Natural Movements, Matthew A. Young

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, the modeling, analysis and control of a multi-degree of freedom (mdof) robotic fluoroscope was investigated. A prototype robotic fluoroscope exists, and consists of a 3 dof mobile platform with two 2 dof Cartesian manipulators mounted symmetrically on opposite sides of the platform. One Cartesian manipulator positions the x-ray generator and the other Cartesian manipulator positions the x-ray imaging device. The robotic fluoroscope is used to x-ray skeletal joints of interest of human subjects performing natural movement activities. In order to collect the data, the Cartesian manipulators must keep the x-ray generation and imaging devices accurately aligned while …