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Full-Text Articles in Robotics

Development And Prototyping Of A Modular Quadruped Towards Testing Standardization For Legged Robot Stability, Michael Conner Larsen Jan 2025

Development And Prototyping Of A Modular Quadruped Towards Testing Standardization For Legged Robot Stability, Michael Conner Larsen

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Legged robots are well-suited for navigating uneven and unmapped terrain, making them valuable in various robotics applications. Maintaining balance and stability in such environments relies on a combination of sensors, control strategies, and mechanical design. However, selecting the most effective sensing and control method for a given use case remains challenging. Previous studies have explored various approaches, integrating combinations of joint angle measurement, inertial measurement units (IMUs), torque-based control, leg force measurement, image processing, and machine learning, paired with numerous controller designs, which can contribute to stability. However, direct comparisons of these methods are often limited by the need for …


Human Swarm Interaction Using Non-Verbal Communication, Arunim Bhattacharya Jan 2025

Human Swarm Interaction Using Non-Verbal Communication, Arunim Bhattacharya

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This research presents experimentally validated strategies for human-swarm robotic interaction through nonverbal communication. Applications of this work are in large-scale coverage problems that include search and rescue operations and environmental monitoring missions. The non-verbal interaction becomes critical in situations where wireless communication methods may be limited by bandwidth constraints, privacy concerns, or environmental clutter. The research objective of this dissertation is to design and evaluate methods of nonverbal communication between a human teleoperator and robotic swarms towards a bidirectional human-swarm interaction framework. Towards this, we first establish a reliable measure of real-time cognitive load that can serve to close the …


Summonable Construction Delivery Robot, Kevin M. Lewis May 2024

Summonable Construction Delivery Robot, Kevin M. Lewis

Honors Capstones

In many different construction industries, there is a need for tools, parts, and other necessary items to be transported quickly and efficiently over various types of terrain. Human resources have often been used to address these needs, which can become very time and cost inefficient over long periods. The design proposal here is aimed at addressing this need by developing an autonomous outdoor mobile robot based on a quadrupedal robot design. This approach differs by incorporating a wheeled and quadrupedal hybrid actuation system that provides terrain negotiation and speed at the appropriate times. The team uses Robot Operating System (ROS) …


Magnetometer-Less State-Estimation Of A Mobile Robot Using Cascaded Kalman Filters, Tommy Le Jan 2024

Magnetometer-Less State-Estimation Of A Mobile Robot Using Cascaded Kalman Filters, Tommy Le

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Localization, or state-estimation algorithms, are one of the most important aspects inthe development of autonomous mobile robots. Typical localization requires an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) along with an external reference, such as GPS (Global Positioning System) for outdoor applications. In indoor applications, the GPS data is not accessible so many mobile robot implementations turn to magnetometers to provide additional pose information. However, in the context of miniaturizing robotic systems, magnetometers are not always reliable due to their proximity to motors and other electronics, causing magnetic distortion and in turn, incorrect pose information. To address this issue, this thesis proposes a …


A One-Wheeled Robot For Exploring Rolling Disk Locomotion, David H. J. Schmidt Jan 2024

A One-Wheeled Robot For Exploring Rolling Disk Locomotion, David H. J. Schmidt

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The work proposed in this thesis is motivated by observations of one-wheel vehicles called monocycles. Whereas the unicycle has the rider sitting on a seat above the wheel, the monocycle’s rider sits inside a large circular hoop that serves as the wheel. Due to the position of the rider inside the wheel, it lowers the overall center of mass of the vehicle below the center of the wheel. For this reason, the uncontrolled longitudinal (forward/backward, or drive axis) dynamics are stable. For modest speeds above a certain threshold, the lateral (side-to-side, or lean axis) dynamics of the monocycle are also …


Design And Development Of A Smartphone App For Health Monitoring And Alerts For Farm Workers, Omer Oztoprak Jan 2023

Design And Development Of A Smartphone App For Health Monitoring And Alerts For Farm Workers, Omer Oztoprak

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This thesis presents the design and development of a novel smartphone applicationfor simultaneous health monitoring and alerts for agricultural workers using multiple wearable sensor devices via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The application combines health data from a range of sensors such as an IMU that detects body movement, a pulse oximeter that captures oxygen saturation and heart rate, and a thermometer that measures body temperature. The software framework is built using Jetpack Compose in Android Studio, and it incorporates the MVVM (Model- View-ViewModel) model to provide optimized data flow and robust efficiency. By integrating the Dagger Hilt Dependency Injection framework, …


A Machine Learning Approach To Intended Motion Prediction For Upper Extremity Exoskeletons, Justin Berdell Jan 2022

A Machine Learning Approach To Intended Motion Prediction For Upper Extremity Exoskeletons, Justin Berdell

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

A fully solid-state, software-defined, one-handed, handle-type control device built around a machine-learning (ML) model that provides intuitive and simultaneous control in position and orientation each in a full three degrees-of-freedom (DOF) is proposed in this paper. The device, referred to as the “Smart Handle”, and it is compact, lightweight, and only reliant on low-cost and readily available sensors and materials for construction. Mobility chairs for persons with motor difficulties could make use of a control device that can learn to recognize arbitrary inputs as control commands. Upper-extremity exoskeletons used in occupational settings and rehabilitation require a natural control device like …


Imu-Based Estimation Of Body Posture In Commercial Fishing, Umme Kawsar Alam Jan 2021

Imu-Based Estimation Of Body Posture In Commercial Fishing, Umme Kawsar Alam

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), work-related musculoskeletaldisorders (WMSDs) account for 33% of all occupational injuries and illnesses in the U.S. In addition, one of the most strenuous occupations in which musculoskeletal disorders are common is known to be commercial fishing. The first step to address this issue is to precisely measure the working postures of workers so that the relation between WMSDs and nonneutral working postures can be systematically investigated. Although the inertial measurement unit (IMU) has recently gained attention in posture measurement due to its portability, it is highly limited to the use as an …


Human-Aware Information-Theoretic Control Of Robotic Swarms, Rafal David Krzysiak Jan 2021

Human-Aware Information-Theoretic Control Of Robotic Swarms, Rafal David Krzysiak

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Robotic swarms provide a scalable and robust solution for monitoring large environments. In this context, the inclusion of a human has the potential advantage of incorporating prior knowledge about the target location or dynamics, thus increasing the overall efficiency of the task at hand. This is especially critical when dealing with time-intensive missions such as search and rescue. In this thesis we develop a general information-theoretic framework to control multiple autonomous robots in search and rescue missions that include a human teleoperator. Human prior knowledge is modeled to capture target location and dynamics, and a mutual information based control is …


Adaptive Object Detection For Autonomous Vehicles, Christopher Wolfe Jan 2020

Adaptive Object Detection For Autonomous Vehicles, Christopher Wolfe

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Autonomous vehicles are gradually entering our daily lives. The goal of fully autonomous commercially available vehicles is becoming closer to reality each day as the contributions from researchers and various institutions are being added to the overall body of knowledge. Object detection is a critical component of an autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicle and draws extensively on results from many fields such as image processing and statistics. In this thesis, we consider ideas from the study of real-time computing and control systems to present a novel method of real-time adaptive object detection. We present a conceptual framework of the method as …


A Multi-Constraint Predictive Control System With Auxiliary Emergency Controllerfor Autonomous Vehicles, Farhad Partovi Ebrahimpour Jan 2020

A Multi-Constraint Predictive Control System With Auxiliary Emergency Controllerfor Autonomous Vehicles, Farhad Partovi Ebrahimpour

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In the last few years, several research groups and companies have worked on developing autonomous vehicles. Among the first automation layers, the safety layer plays a significant role in this field. However, considering safety should not diminish the importance of the efficiency of the vehicle in terms of path tracking with the desired speed. This thesis introduces a multi-constraint predictive control algorithm along with a safety layer to guarantee object avoidance in emergency situations. First, there is a quick review of autonomous cars and their functionalities. In the following, a controller switching mechanism is proposed and designed. It switches the …


The Social Presence Of Jibo, Parisa Farhadi Jan 2019

The Social Presence Of Jibo, Parisa Farhadi

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This research is an attempt to investigate how a social robot is perceived by users at the first encounter. And to find out whether a social robot like Jibo is understood merely as a kind of a technological object or a social entity. Previous studies in Human-Robot Interaction have considered social presence as a mediator in users’ social responses toward robots; however, the focus of this study is the social presence itself and investigates whether Jibo produces a sense of presence during initial encounters. To this end, the current study examines individuals’ perceptions of and responses to Jibo. Participants (N=8) …


Exploring Cyber-Physical Systems, Misbah Uddin Mohammed Jan 2019

Exploring Cyber-Physical Systems, Misbah Uddin Mohammed

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The advances in IOT, Computer Vision, AI and Machine Learning have made these technologies ubiquitous to our daily lives. From Smart Phones to Connected Vehicles, Cyber Physical systems have been interspersed into everything we interact in today’s world. The aim or this thesis was to explore these advances in Cyber Physical Systems and analyze the different sectors they were affecting. We then hand-picked certain domains and explored further by carrying out practical projects using some of the latest software and hardware resources available. Technologies like Amazon Alexa services, NVIDIA Jetson boards, TensorFlow, OpenCV, NodeJS were heavily employed in our various …