Abstract
Robotic manipulation, an area inside the field of industrial automation and robotics, consists of using a robotic arm to guide and grasp a desired object through actuators such as a vacuum or fingers, among others. Some objects, such as fragile ceramic pieces, require special attention to the force and the gripping method exerted on them. For this purpose, two grippers were developed, where one of them is a rotary vacuum gripper and the other is an impact gripper with three fingers, each one equipped with a load sensor capable of evaluating the values of load exerted by the grip actuators onto the object to be manipulated. The vacuum gripper was developed for the purpose of glazing a coffee saucer and the gripper with three fingers was developed for the purpose of polishing a coffee cup. Being that the impact gripper with sensorial feedback reacts to the excess and lack of grip force exerted, both these grippers were developed with success, handling with ease the ceramic pieces proposed.

Abstract
The Darwinian Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO) is an evolutionary algorithm that extends the Particle Swarm Optimization using natural selection to enhance the ability to escape from sub-optimal solutions. An extension of the DPSO to multi-robot applications has been recently proposed and denoted as Robotic Darwinian PSO (RDPSO), benefiting from the dynamical partitioning of the whole population of robots, hence decreasing the amount of required information exchange among robots. This paper further extends the previously proposed algorithm using fractional calculus concepts to control the convergence rate, while considering the robot dynamical characteristics. Moreover, to improve the convergence analysis of the RDPSO, an adjustment of the fractional coefficient based on mobile robot constraints is presented and experimentally assessed with 2 real platforms. Afterwards, this novel fractional-order RDPSO is evaluated in 12 physical robots being further explored using a larger population of 100 simulated mobile robots within a larger scenario. Experimental results show that changing the fractional coefficient does not significantly improve the final solution but presents a significant influence in the convergence time because of its inherent memory property.

Abstract
In this paper it is studied the relation between the angle of attack and the velocity of the bird, the tail influence over the bird trajectory, the gliding and the flapping flight in a closed loop with fractional order controllers. The results are positive for the design and construction of flying robots having similarities with flying animals. The development of computational simulation based on the dynamic of the robotic bird that should allow testing strategies and algorithms of control.

Abstract

Abstract
In this work, a novel method for segmentation of Remote Sensing (RS) images based on the Darwinian Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO) for determining the n-1 optimal n-level threshold on a given image is proposed. The efficiency of the proposed method is compared with the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based segmentation method. Results show that DPSO-based image segmentation performs better than PSO-based method in a number of different measures.

Abstract
This paper proposes two extensions of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Darwinian Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO), respectively named as RPSO (Robotic PSO) and RDPSO (Robotic DPSO), so as to adapt these promising biological-inspired techniques to the domain of multi-robot systems, by taking into account obstacle avoidance. These novel algorithms are demonstrated for groups of simulated robots performing a distributed exploration task. The concepts of social exclusion and social inclusion are used in the RDPSO algorithm as a punish-reward mechanism enhancing the ability to escape from local optima. Experimental results obtained in a simulated environment show that biological and sociological inspiration can be useful to meet the challenges of robotic applications that can be described as optimization problems (e.g. search and rescue). © 2011 IEEE.