Robotics Commons^™

Development And Implementation Of Robot Operating Systems For Undergraduates, Chelsey Spitzner

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The purpose of this project was to create an undergraduate junior lab to teach students about Robotic Operating System (ROS). The labs were designed to highlight the usefulness of ROS and the process used. Designing algorithms, how to send/receive messages, and the hierarchy of how nodes work with each other are emphasized. Taking packages that are open-source then modifying them is also emphasized. This is done so that students can transfer their knowledge from this course to other robot operating systems.

Off Road Autonomous Vehicle Modeling And Repeatability Using Real World Telemetry Via Simulation, Matthew Paul Spencer

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

One approach to autonomous control of high mobility ground vehicle platforms operating on challenging terrain is with the use of predictive simulation. Using a simulated or virtual world, an autonomous system can optimize use of its control systems by predicting interaction between the vehicle and ground as well as the vehicle actuator state. Such a simulation allows the platform to assess multiple possible scenarios before attempting to execute a path. Physically realistic simulations covering all of these domains are currently computationally expensive, and are unable to provide fast execution times when assessing each individual scenario due to the use of …

Collective Hydrodynamics Of Robotic Fish, Rohit S. Pandhare

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Many animals in nature travel in groups either for protection, survival, or endurance. Among these, fish do so under the burden of hydrodynamic loads, which incites questions as to the significance of the multi-body fluid-mediated interactions that facilitate collective swimming. We study such interactions in the idealized setting of a rotational array of robotic fish whose tails undergo a prescribed flapping motion, but whose swimming speed is determined as a natural result of the hydrodynamic effects. Specifically, we examine how the measured collective speed of the swimmers varies with the imposed frequency and amplitude of their tail flapping, and with …

An Experimental Study Towards Underwater Propulsion System Using Structure Borne Traveling Waves, Shreyas Suhas Gadekar

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The method of generating steady-state structure-borne traveling waves underwater in an infinite media creates abundant opportunities in the field of propulsive applications, and they are gaining attention from several researchers. This experimental study provides a framework for harnessing traveling waves in a 1D beam immersed under quiescent water using two force input methods and providing a motion to an object floating on the surface of the water.

In this study, underwater traveling waves are tailored using structural vibrations at five different frequencies in the range of 10Hz to 300Hz. The resulting fluid motion provides a propulsive thrust that moves a …

Garden Bot: Autonomous Home Garden Weed Removal Robot, Brendon Lovejoy, Robert Connolly, Isaac Lucas, Stevan Veselinov

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

With frequent weeding being a tedious chore and an essential task for a successful garden, there is need for an automated method of handling this routine. Existing technologies utilize computer vision, GPS, multiple units and other tools to remove weeds from garden plots. However, these solutions are often complex and expensive, suited for large agricultural plots in contrast to small-scale home gardens. In addition, many of these technologies, along with manual tillers and cultivators suited for home use, are unable to perform weeding within rows of crops in a process known as intra-row weeding. The Garden Bot is an autonomous, …

Cardbot, Jakob Reiter, Grant Crump, Drake Drivere, Adam Miner

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Many people enjoy playing cards but playing cards in the times of COVID-19 is difficult. There are many designs for dealing and shuffling robots, but few include sanitization and autonomous operation. This design is for a BlackJack card dealing and shuffling robot that will be autonomous and will sanitize the playing cards using UV-C LEDs. This will assist in keeping the user safe while playing a game of BlackJack

Efficient And Accurate Cordic Pipelined Architecture Chip Design Based On Binomial Approximation For Biped Robot, Rih-Lung Chung, Yen Hsueh, Shih-Lun Chen, Patricia Angela R. Abu

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Recently, much research has focused on the design of biped robots with stable and smooth walking ability, identical to human beings, and thus, in the coming years, biped robots will accomplish rescue or exploration tasks in challenging environments. To achieve this goal, one of the important problems is to design a chip for real-time calculation of moving length and rotation angle of the biped robot. This paper presents an efficient and accurate coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC)-based efficient chip design to calculate the moving length and rotation angle for each step of the biped robot. In a previous work, the …

Design And Control Of Quasi-Direct Drive Actuation For Lightweight And Versatile Wearable Robots, Shuangyue Yu

Dissertations and Theses

Wearable robots have shown great potential for augmenting the physical capabilities of humans in lab settings. However, wearable robots for augmenting the physical capabilities of humans under community-based conditions are the new frontier of robotics. Furthermore, the design and control are still considered to be grand challenges for providing physical augmentation for humans. In terms of design, the state-of-the-art exoskeletons are typically rigid, bulky, and limited to lab settings. In terms of control, most of the rhythmic controllers are not versatile and are focused only on steady-state walking assistance.

The motivation behind my research is to improve both the design …

Design Of Human Inspired Feet For Mithra, A High-Performance Humanoid Robot, Spencer Lyle Brewster

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the foot design for the new humanoid robot Mithra, with the goal to improve impact mitigation, natural gait throughout the gait cycle and balance. Using human gait parameters, a stiff aluminum foot was designed to emulate human center of pressure rollover trajectories. In addition, a 2D dynamic Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of the gait cycle was created in Abaqus to rapidly prototype foot designs. Data from the FE model provided impact forces, parameters for distal foot power evaluation and maximum lean angles. From this model a flexible nylon foot was optimized for the given design objectives. The …

The Implementation Of Advanced Digitalization In The Oil And Gas Industry, Ensieh Rezafar

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractThe immature advanced digitalization in the oil and gas industry can limit access to the potential value of mature progressive digitalization. Oil and gas leaders must expedite the implementation of advanced digitalization to increase organizational proficiencies and reduce costs and losses. Grounded in Pettigrew and Whipp’s dimensions of strategic change theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies some leaders in the oil and gas industry used to implement advanced digitalization. The participants were seven leaders in two oil service companies in North America involved in the successful implementation of progressive digitalization. Data were collected …

Factors Influencing The Effectiveness Of Managing Human–Robot Teams, Theodore B. Terry

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Certain factors can influence the capabilities of a robot–human team by affecting their social and behavioral dynamics in a work environment. But these factors were not known due to the progressive nature of human–robot partnerships and a lack of peer-reviewed literature on the topic. This e-Delphi study aimed to identify and understand these unknown influential factors based on the participants’ insights. The overarching research question asked about the need to determine factors that might influence the effectiveness of managing human-robot teams. The basis for the conceptual framework for this study was the theory of communication used in organizational management. Twelve …

Learning Robot Motion From Creative Human Demonstration, Charles C. Dietzel

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a learning from demonstration framework that enables a robot to learn and perform creative motions from human demonstrations in real-time. In order to satisfy all of the functional requirements for the framework, the developed technique is comprised of two modular components, which integrate together to provide the desired functionality. The first component, called Dancing from Demonstration (DfD), is a kinesthetic learning from demonstration technique. This technique is capable of playing back newly learned motions in real-time, as well as combining multiple learned motions together in a configurable way, either to reduce trajectory error or to generate entirely …

System Development Of An Unmanned Ground Vehicle And Implementation Of An Autonomous Navigation Module In A Mine Environment, Jonas Amoama Bredu Jnr

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

There are numerous benefits to the insights gained from the exploration and exploitation of underground mines. There are also great risks and challenges involved, such as accidents that have claimed many lives. To avoid these accidents, inspections of the large mines were carried out by the miners, which is not always economically feasible and puts the safety of the inspectors at risk. Despite the progress in the development of robotic systems, autonomous navigation, localization and mapping algorithms, these environments remain particularly demanding for these systems. The successful implementation of the autonomous unmanned system will allow mine workers to autonomously determine …

Improving Robotic Decision-Making In Unmodeled Situations, Nicholas Scott Ohi

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Existing methods of autonomous robotic decision-making are often fragile when faced with inaccurate or incompletely modeled distributions of uncertainty, also known as ambiguity. While decision-making under ambiguity is a field of study that has been gaining interest, many existing methods tend to be computationally challenging, require many assumptions about the nature of the problem, and often require much prior knowledge. Therefore, they do not scale well to complex real-world problems where fulfilling all of these requirements is often impractical if not impossible. The research described in this dissertation investigates novel approaches to robotic decision-making strategies which are resilient to …

Multimodal Adversarial Learning, Uche Osahor

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) have proven to be an exceptional tool for object recognition, generative modelling, and multi-modal learning in various computer vision applications. However, recent findings have shown that such state-of-the-art models can be easily deceived by inserting slight imperceptible perturbations to key pixels in the input. A good target detection systems can accurately identify targets by localizing their coordinates on the input image of interest. This is ideally achieved by labeling each pixel in an image as a background or a potential target pixel. However, prior research still confirms that such state of the art targets models …

High Energy And Power Density Peptidoglycan Musclesthrough Super-Viscous Nanoconfined Water, Haozhen Wang, Zhi-Lun Liu, Jianpei Lao, Sheng Zhang, Rinat Abzalimov, Tong Wang, Xi Chen

Advanced Science Research Center

Water-responsive (WR) materials that reversibly deform in response to humidity changes show great potential for developing muscle-like actuators for miniature and biomimetic robotics. Here, it is presented that Bacillus (B.) subtilis’ peptidoglycan (PG) exhibits WR actuation energy and power densities reaching 72.6 MJ m−3 and 9.1 MW m−3, respectively, orders of magnitude higher than those of frequently used actuators, such as piezoelectric actuators and dielectric elastomers. PG can deform as much as 27.2% within 110 ms, and its actuation pressure reaches ≈354.6 MPa. Surprisingly, PG exhibits an energy conversion efficiency of ≈66.8%, which can be attributed to its super-viscous nanoconfined …

Assessing The Alignment Of Social Robots With Trustworthy Ai Design Guidelines: A Preliminary Research Study, Abdikadar Ali, Danielle Thaxton, Ankur Chattopadhyay

Posters-at-the-Capitol

The last couple of years have seen a strong movement supporting the need of having intelligent consumer products align with specific design guidelines for trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI). This global movement has led to multiple institutional recommendations for ethically aligned trustworthy design of the AI driven technologies, like consumer robots and autonomous vehicles. There has been prior research towards finding security and privacy related vulnerabilities within various types of social robots. However, none of these previous works has studied the implications of these vulnerabilities in terms of the robot design aligning with trustworthy AI. In an attempt to address this …

Robotic Olfactory-Based Navigation With Mobile Robots, Lingxiao Wang

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Robotic odor source localization (OSL) is a technology that enables mobile robots or autonomous vehicles to find an odor source in unknown environments. It has been viewed as challenging due to the turbulent nature of airflows and the resulting odor plume characteristics. The key to correctly finding an odor source is designing an effective olfactory-based navigation algorithm, which guides the robot to detect emitted odor plumes as cues in finding the source. This dissertation proposes three kinds of olfactory-based navigation methods to improve search efficiency while maintaining a low computational cost, incorporating different machine learning and artificial intelligence methods.

A. …

Development Of A Model For Control Of A Flexible Production Sewage System, Shalala Jafarova

Scientific-technical journal

This article discusses the development of a production module management model for one area of the technological process. New modeling methods are used for this purpose. Mathematical modeling and research is one of the key issues in the early stages of designing automated and automated systems operating in uncertain or fuzzy environments. Efficient modeling devices are used to solve these problems, taking into account the specific features of the process. The article builds the management model of the production module and obtains the results.

3d Shape Estimation Of Negative Obstacles Using Lidar Point Cloud Data, Viswadeep Lebakula

Theses and Dissertations

Obstacle detection and avoidance plays a crucial role in the autonomous navigation of unmanned ground vehicles (UGV). Information about the obstacles decreases as the distance between the UGV and obstacles increases. However, this information decreases much more rapidly for negative obstacles than for positive obstacles. UGV navigation becomes more challenging in off-road environments due to the higher probability of finding negative obstacles (e.g., potholes, ditches, trenches, etc.) compared with on-road environments. One approach to solve this problem is to avoid the candidate path with a negative obstacle, but in off-road environments avoiding negative obstacles in all situations is not possible. …