Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
The development of an intelligent wheel chair (IW) platform that may be easily adapted to any commercial electric powered wheelchair and aid any person with special mobility needs is the main objective of the IntellWheels project. To be able to achieve this main objective, three distinct control methods were implemented in the IW: manual, shared and automatic. Several algorithms were developed for each of these control methods. This paper presents three of the most significant of those algorithms with emphasis on the shared control method. Experiments were performed by users suffering from cerebral palsy, using a realistic simulator, in order to validate the approach. The experiments revealed the importance of using shared (aided) controls for users with severe disabilities. The patients still felt having complete control over the wheelchair movement when using a shared control at a 50 % level and thus this control type was very well accepted. Thus it may be used in intelligent wheelchairs since it is able to correct the direction in case of involuntary movements of the user but still gives him a sense of complete control over the IW movement.

Abstract

Abstract
In this paper, we propose a novel omnidirectional walking engine that achieves energy efficient, human like, stable and fast walking. We augment the 3D inverted pendulum with a spring model to implement a height change in the robot's center of mass trajectory. This model is used as simplified model of the robot and the zero moment point (ZMP) criterion is used as the stability indicator. The presented walking engine consists of 5 main modules including the "next posture generator" module, the "foot trajectory generator" module, the "center of mass (CoM) trajectory generator" module, the "robot posture controller" module and "Inverse kinematics (IK) solver" module. The focus of the paper is the generation of the position of the next step and the CoM trajectory generation. For the trajectory generator, we extend the 3D-IPM with an undamped spring to implement height changes of the CoM. With this model we can implement active compliance for the robot's gait, resulting in a more energy efficient movement. We present a modified method for solving ZMP equations which derivation is based on the new proposed model for omnidirectional walking. The walk engine is tested on simulated and a real NAO robot. We use policy search to optimize the parameters of the walking engines for the standard 3D-LIPM and our proposed model to compare the performance of both models each with their optimal parameters. We optimize the policy parameters in terms of energy efficiency for a fixed walking speed. The experimental results show the advantages of our proposed model over 3D-LIPM.

Abstract
The adoption of robotics technology has the potential to advance quality, efficiency and safety for manufacturing enterprises, in particular small and medium-sized enterprises. This paper presents a human-robot interaction (HRI) system that enables a robot to receive commands, provide information to a human teammate and ask them a favor. In order to build a robust HRI system based on gesture recognition, three key issues are addressed: richness, multiple feature fusion and failure verification. The developed system has been tested and validated in a realistic lab with a real mobile manipulator and a human teammate to solve a puzzle game. © 2017 IEEE.