Engineering Commons^™

Soft Foam Robot With Caterpillar-Inspired Gait Regimes For Terrestrial Locomotion, Cassandra M. Donatelli, Zachary T. Serlin, Piers Echols-Jones, Anthony E. Scibelli, Alexandra Cohen, Jeanne-Marie Musca, Shane Rozen-Levy, David Buckingham, Robert White, Barry A. Trimmer

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Caterpillars are the soft bodied larvae of lepidopteran insects. They have evolved to occupy an extremely diverse range of natural environments and to locomote in complex three-dimensional structures without articulated joint or hydrostatic control. These animals make excellent bio-inspiration for the field of soft robotics because of their diversity and adaptability. In this paper, we present SquMA Bot, a caterpillar-inspired soft robot. The robot's body is primarily composed of a soft viscoelastic foam, and it is actuated using a motor-tendon system. SquMA Bot is able to mimic the inching gait of a caterpillar and can use its flexible body to …

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 …

Real Time And High Fidelity Quadcopter Tracking System, Tyler Mckay Hall

Computer Engineering

This project was conceived as a desired to have an affordable, flexible and physically compact tracking system for high accuracy spatial and orientation tracking. Specifically, this implementation is focused on providing a low cost motion capture system for future research. It is a tool to enable the further creation of systems that would require the use of accurate placement of landing pads, payload acquires and delivery. This system will provide the quadcopter platform a coordinate system that can be used in addition to GPS.

Field research with quadcopter manufacturers, photographers, agriculture and research organizations were contact and interviewed for information …

An Unmanned Aerial System For Prescribed Fires, Evan M. Beachly

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Prescribed fires can lessen wildfire severity and control invasive species, but some terrains may be difficult, dangerous, or costly to burn with existing tools. This thesis presents the design of an unmanned aerial system that can ignite prescribed fires from the air, with less cost and risk than with aerial ignition from a manned aircraft. The prototype was evaluated in-lab and successfully used to ignite interior areas of two prescribed fires. Additionally, we introduce an approach that integrates a lightweight fire simulation to autonomously plan safe flight trajectories and suggest effective fire lines. Both components are unique in that they …

Applied Deep Learning: Automated Segmentation Of White Matter Hyperintensities (Wmh) On Brain Mr Images, Matt Berseth

DHI Digital Projects Showcase

Small vessel disease plays a crucial role in stroke, dementia, and ageing. White matter hyperintensities (WMH) of vascular origin are one of the main consequences of small vessel disease and well visible on brain MR images. Quantification of WMH volume, location, and shape is of key importance in clinical research studies and likely to find its way into clinical practice; supporting diagnosis, prognosis, and monitoring of treatment for dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases. It has been noted that visual rating of WMH has important limitations and hence a more detailed segmentation of WMH is preferred. Various automated WMH segmentation techniques …

Adaft: A Resource-Efficient Framework For Adaptive Fault-Tolerance In Cyber-Physical Systems, Ye Xu

Doctoral Dissertations

Cyber-physical systems frequently have to use massive redundancy to meet application requirements for high reliability. While such redundancy is required, it can be activated adaptively, based on the current state of the controlled plant. Most of the time the physical plant is in a state that allows for a lower level of fault-tolerance. Avoiding the continuous deployment of massive fault-tolerance will greatly reduce the workload of CPSs. In this dissertation, we demonstrate a software simulation framework (AdaFT) that can automatically generate the sub-spaces within which our adaptive fault-tolerance can be applied. We also show the theoretical benefits of AdaFT, and …

Emerging Role Of Robot-Assisted Occupational Therapy For Children With Down Syndrome, Venera Krasniqi, Nevena Ackovska, Katerina Zdravkova

UBT International Conference

Robotic technology is becoming increasingly popular as a platform for both education and entertainment. It also provides us with new conceptual directions which might have incredibly positive impact on children with physical growth delays and intellectual disabilities. In this research project, the educational robot Roamer Too from Valiant Technologies has been used to explore the development of social skills of children with Down syndrome. In conjunction with an interactive collaborative environment, this device represents a unique opportunity for these children to fully engage in learning, play, communication, build relationships and have fun. The results of this study indicate that educational …

State Feedback Of Complex Systems Using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, Vassiliki Mpelogianni, Ioannis Arvanitakis, Peter P. Groumpos

UBT International Conference

Complex systems have become a research area with increasing interest over the last years. The emergence of new technologies, the increase in computational power with reduced resources and cost, the integration of the physical world with computer based systems has created the possibility of significantly improving the quality of life of humans. While a significant degree of automation within these systems exists and has been provided in the past decade with examples of the smart homes and energy efficient buildings, a paradigm shift towards autonomy has been noted. The need for autonomy requires the extraction of a model; while a …

Development Trends In Robotics, Peter Kopacek

UBT International Conference

Robots are always a frequently used as an example for Mechatronic Systems. Currently the field of robotics is very fast growing. Therefore the overview is definitely not actual and have to be improved. The main goal of this contribution is to make some additional remarks to the existing kinds of robots and introduce some new with special emphasis to Mechatronic Systems like manufacturing automation by Production 4.0.

Answering Food Insecurity: Serving The Community With Food And Knowledge Using Technology, Courtney Simpson

Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement

The courses of Tech120, CGT110, and ENGT 180/181 and Red Gold at Purdue collaborated to design a robot that would plant and water a garden for a local community charter school. The students centered the project on the users’ needs for fresh food, nutrition education, and early exposure to STEM for children. The school, Anderson Preparatory Academy (APA), is comprised of many children who come from low-income families and are in the free or reduced lunch program. Inspired from “Farm Bot,” a similar system that allows for almost hands-free gardening, the “Boiler Bot” is designed to be scalable so children …

Modeling Of Force And Motion Transmission In Tendon-Driven Surgical Robots, Farshad Anooshahpour

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Tendon-based transmission is a common approach for transferring motion and forces in surgical robots. In spite of design simplicity and compactness that comes with the tendon drives, there exists a number of issues associated with the tendon-based transmission. In particular, the elasticity of the tendons and the frictional interaction between the tendon and the routing result in substantially nonlinear behavior. Also, in surgical applications, the distal joints of the robot and instruments cannot be sensorized in most cases due to technical limitations. Therefore, direct measurement of forces and use of feedback motion/force control for compensation of uncertainties in tendon-based motion …

Implementation Of The Tickbot: Results And Implications For Modeling, Alexis White, Armin Bahrani, Amanda Devleeschower, Holly Gaff

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Formal Performance Guarantees For An Approach To Human In The Loop Robot Missions, Damian Lyons, Ron Arkin, Shu Jiang, Matt O'Brien, Feng Tang, Peng Tang

Faculty Publications

Abstract— A key challenge in the automatic verification of robot mission software, especially critical mission software, is to be able to effectively model the performance of a human operator and factor that into the formal performance guarantees for the mission. We present a novel approach to modelling the skill level of the operator and integrating it into automatic verification using a linear Gaussians model parameterized by experimental calibration. Our approach allows us to model different skill levels directly in terms of the behavior of the lumped, robot plus operator, system.

Using MissionLab and VIPARS (a behavior-based robot mission verification …

Rate Based Impact Analysis, Nishant Sharma

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Impact Analysis (IA) identifies control and data dependencies to determine the system components that could be affected by a change. Changes to robotic systems as they are updated often alter the flow of control and sensor data. Changes to the rates at which data is published from sensors, controllers, and other parts of the system are particularly subtle and difficult to detect. These rate changes, even if minor (e.g. lowering the frame rate of a camera), can propagate throughout the system and have broad impacts. However, for robotic systems, these changes in flow rate cannot be precisely tracked by just …

Event And Time-Triggered Control Module Layers For Individual Robot Control Architectures Of Unmanned Agricultural Ground Vehicles, Tyler Troyer

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Automation in the agriculture sector has increased to an extent where the accompanying methods for unmanned field management are becoming more economically viable. This manifests in the industry’s recent presentation of conceptual cab-less machines that perform all field operations under the high-level task control of a single remote operator. A dramatic change in the overall workflow for field tasks that historically assumed the presence of a human in the immediate vicinity of the work is predicted. This shift in the entire approach to farm machinery work provides producers increased control and productivity over high-level tasks and less distraction from operating …

Developing Grounded Goals Through Instant Replay Learning, Lisa Meeden, Douglas S. Blank

Computer Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

This paper describes and tests a developmental architecture that enables a robot to explore its world, to find and remember interesting states, to associate these states with grounded goal representations, and to generate action sequences so that it can re-visit these states of interest. The model is composed of feed-forward neural networks that learn to make predictions at two levels through a dual mechanism of motor babbling for discovering the interesting goal states and instant replay learning for developing the grounded goal representations. We compare the performance of the model with grounded goal representations versus random goal representations, and find …

Effects Of Anthropomorphism On Trust In Human-Robot Interaction, Keith R. Macarthur, William T. Shugars, Tracy L. Sanders, Peter A. Hancock

Keith Reid MacArthur

Ani-Bot: A Mixed-Reality Ready Modular Robotics System, Zhuangying Xu, Yuanzhi Cao

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

DIY modular robotics has always had a strong appeal to makers and designers; being able to quickly design, build, and animate their own robots opens the possibility of bringing imaginations to life. However, current interfaces to control and program the DIY robot either lacks connection and consistency between the users and target (Graphical User Interface) or suffers from limited control capabilities due to the lack of versatility and functionality (Tangible User interface). We present Ani-Bot, a modular robotics system that allows users to construct Do-It-Yourself (DIY) robots and use mixed-reality approach to interact with them instantly. Ani-Bot enables novel user …

Learning Multimodal Structures In Computer Vision, Ali Taalimi

Doctoral Dissertations

A phenomenon or event can be received from various kinds of detectors or under different conditions. Each such acquisition framework is a modality of the phenomenon. Due to the relation between the modalities of multimodal phenomena, a single modality cannot fully describe the event of interest. Since several modalities report on the same event introduces new challenges comparing to the case of exploiting each modality separately.

We are interested in designing new algorithmic tools to apply sensor fusion techniques in the particular signal representation of sparse coding which is a favorite methodology in signal processing, machine learning and statistics to …

Modeling The Consumer Acceptance Of Retail Service Robots, So Young Song

Doctoral Dissertations

This study uses the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) and domestication theories as the underlying framework of an acceptance model of retail service robots (RSRs). The model illustrates the relationships among facilitators, attitudes toward Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), anxiety toward robots, anticipated service quality, and the acceptance of RSRs. Specifically, the researcher investigates the extent to which the facilitators of usefulness, social capability, the appearance of RSRs, and the attitudes toward HRI affect acceptance and increase the anticipation of service quality. The researcher also tests the inhibiting role of pre-existing anxiety toward robots on the relationship between these facilitators and attitudes …

Computational Imaging Approach To Recovery Of Target Coordinates Using Orbital Sensor Data, Michael D. Vaughan

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the components necessary for simulation of an image-based recovery of the position of a target using orbital image sensors. Each component is considered in detail, focusing on the effect that design choices and system parameters have on the accuracy of the position estimate. Changes in sensor resolution, varying amounts of blur, differences in image noise level, selection of algorithms used for each component, and lag introduced by excessive processing time all contribute to the accuracy of the result regarding recovery of target coordinates using orbital sensor data.

Using physical targets and sensors in this scenario would be …

An Interactive Interface For Nursing Robots., Ankita Sahu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) is inevitable for a human user while working with assistive robots. There are various aspects of pHRI, such as choosing the interface, type of control schemes implemented and the modes of interaction. The research work presented in this thesis concentrates on a health-care assistive robot called Adaptive Robot Nursing Assistant (ARNA). An assistive robot in a health-care environment has to be able to perform routine tasks and be aware of the surrounding environment at the same time. In order to operate the robot, a teleoperation based interaction would be tedious for some patients as it would …

Cyber-Physical System Characterization And Co-Regulation Of A Quadrotor Uas, Seth E. Doebbeling

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

An Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) is a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) in which a host of real-time computational tasks contending for shared resources must be cooperatively managed to obtain mission objectives. Traditionally, control of the UAS is designed assuming a fixed, high sampling rate in order to maintain reliable performance and margins of stability. But emerging methods challenge this design by dynamically allocating resources to computational tasks, thereby affecting control and mission performance. To apply these emerging strategies, a characterization and understanding of the effects of timing on control and trajectory following performance is required. Going beyond traditional control evaluation techniques, …

Belief-Space Planning For Resourceful Manipulation And Mobility, Dirk Ruiken

Doctoral Dissertations

Robots are increasingly expected to work in partially observable and unstructured environments. They need to select actions that exploit perceptual and motor resourcefulness to manage uncertainty based on the demands of the task and environment. The research in this dissertation makes two primary contributions. First, it develops a new concept in resourceful robot platforms called the UMass uBot and introduces the sixth and seventh in the uBot series. uBot-6 introduces multiple postural configurations that enable different modes of mobility and manipulation to meet the needs of a wide variety of tasks and environmental constraints. uBot-7 extends this with the use …

Motion Planning For Simple Two-Wheeled Robots, Ronald I. Greenberg, Jeffery M. Karp

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper considers various simple ways of navigating in a 2-dimensianal territory with a two-wheeled robot of a type typical in educational robotics. We determine shortest paths under various modes of operation and compare.

Multi-Scale Spatial Cognition Models And Bio-Inspired Robot Navigation, Martin I. Llofriu Alonso

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The rodent navigation system has been the focus of study for over a century. Discoveries made lately have provided insight on the inner workings of this system. Since then, computational approaches have been used to test hypothesis, as well as to improve robotics navigation and learning by taking inspiration on the rodent navigation system.

This dissertation focuses on the study of the multi-scale representation of the rat’s current location found in the rat hippocampus. It first introduces a model that uses these different scales in the Morris maze task to show their advantages. The generalization power of larger scales of …

Farmbot Rfid Integration, Laura R. Swart

Computer Engineering

The purpose of this project is to assist the company FarmBot improve their product by adding RFID tracking to the FarmBot robot. RFID tracking will allow the robot to select and pick up tool heads without any user interference.

Blend It Wine Blending Distribution System, Connor Clarry, Russell Temple, Matt Moren

Mechanical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Wheelieking Trainer Project Report, Harold Hall Iii, Nathaniel Fox, Thomas Niemisto

Biomedical Engineering

In this report we will detail the design and implementation process of the WheelieKing Trainer project, a device that helps people learn how to do wheelies on a bicycle by preventing backward falls. Formal project requirements are specified, followed by the ideation and iteration process to meet those requirements. The components and methods used to create the device are described in detail. The results of the development process and usage test results of the device are included. Appendices at the end of this report include references, supporting analyses, and project management and timeline details.

The Following Robot, Juan D. Cerda, Matthew S. Kwan, Vi M. Le

Computer Engineering

The objective of this project is to design, build, and test an autonomous robot with an associated Android application. The robot uses on board inertial measurement sensors (magnetometer, accelerometer, gyroscope) and coordinates itself through Bluetooth communication with the similar built­in measurement sensors on the Android phone to mimic and follow movement. The Following Robot incorporates the same basic movement functionality as a typical RC car. The robot follows the user’s phone through an application on one’s phone. This application accesses the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope data and translates into appropriate conversions. Methods of tracking and calculating distance or angular displacement …