Recently, a study on reducing the weight of the robot arm, which enables a high-speed operation and enables reducing the energy consumption has been actively carried out. A lightweight robot arm is hard to control because it behaves like a flexible body rather than a rigid body. This paper proposes a controller which combines a PID controller and a fuzzy logic controller for control the position and vibration of the flexible robot arm. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed controller, MSC.ADAMS computational model which incorporates the finite element flexible robot arm model is developed, and is used for performing simulations. Simulations are carried out with two reference inputs, and three end masses. Simulation results show that the proposed controller controls the position and vibration of the flexible robot arm adaptively without being affected by the reference input and the end mass.

Robotic manipulators are increasingly deployed in complex environments or to perform complex tasks. Studies on dual-arm-robots have been continually carried out in robotics areas to provide robots in dangerous environments, similar to those which human beings would be normally in, without a special change to the working environment. In previous study, a dual-arm-robot has been designed. The robot, however, has some defects in its heavy weight and big shape. In order to reduce weight of an arm robot, the robot has been designed using a hollow-shaft-servo- assembly. The hollow-shaft-servo-assembly is composed of a hollow-shaft-servo-motor, a hollow- shaft-harmonic-drive, a hollow-shaft-brake, a hollow-shaft-encoder, and a servo-drive.

In this paper, optimal design of the second arm in a SCARA robot was studied. The mass and moment of inertia of the second arm of a SCARA robot have great effects on performance indices such as cycle times and torques of the first and second axes. To reduce the mass and moment of inertia, optimal design was carried out by FEM analysis using parameters such as width and height of the arm rib, which was newly adopted to decrease the arm thickness in keeping stiffness. Computer simulation was conducted in X and Y directional paths. As a result of the optimal design, maximum torques of the first and second axes decreased by 10.1% in maximum.

Home robot arms require a payload of 2 kg to perform various household tasks; at the same time, they should be operated by low-capacity motors and low-cost speed reducers to ensure reasonable product cost. Furthermore, as robot arms on mobile platforms are battery-driven, their energy efficiency should be very high. To satisfy these requirements, we designed a lightweight counterbalance mechanism (CBM) based on a spring and a wire and developed a home robot arm with five degrees of freedom (DOF) based on this CBM. The CBM compensates for gravitational torques applied to the two pitch joints that are most affected by the robot’s weight. The developed counterbalance robot adopts a belt-pulley based parallelogram mechanism for 2-DOF gravity compensation. Experiments using this robot demonstrate that the CBM allows the robot to meet the above-mentioned requirements, even with low-capacity motors and speed reducers.

This work presents a design and control method for a flexible robot arm operated by a wire drive that follows human gestures. When moving the robot arm to a desired position, the necessary wire moving length is calculated and the motors are rotated accordingly to the length. A robotic arm is composed of a total of two module-formed mechanism similar to real human motion. Two wires are used as a closed loop in one module, and universal joints are attached to each disk to create up, down, left, and right movements. In order to control the motor, the anti-windup PID was applied to limit the sudden change usually caused by accumulated error in the integral control term. In addition, master/ slave communication protocol and operation program for linking 6 motors to MYO sensor and IMU sensor output were developed at the same time. This makes it possible to receive the image information of the camera attached to the robot arm and simultaneously send the control command to the robot at high speed.

Reinforcement learning has been applied to various problems in robotics. However, it was still hard to train complex robotic manipulation tasks since there is a few models which can be applicable to general tasks. Such general models require a lot of training episodes. In these reasons, deep neural networks which have shown to be good function approximators have not been actively used for robot manipulation task. Recently, some of these challenges are solved by a set of methods, such as Guided Policy Search, which guide or limit search directions while training of a deep neural network based policy model. These frameworks are already applied to a humanoid robot, PR2. However, in robotics, it is not trivial to adjust existing algorithms designed for one robot to another robot. In this paper, we present our implementation of Guided Policy Search to the robotic arms of the Baxter Research Robot. To meet the goals and needs of the project, we build on an existing implementation of Baxter Agent class for the Guided Policy Search algorithm code using the built-in Python interface. This work is expected to play an important role in popularizing robot manipulation reinforcement learning methods on cost-effective robot platforms.

This paper deals with the paddle type end of arm tool for rescue robot instead of rescue worker in dangerous environments such as fire, earthquake, national disaster and defense. It is equipped at the dual arm manipulator of the rescue robot to safely lift up an injured person. It consists of the paddle for lifting person, sensors for detecting insertion of person onto the paddle, sensor for measuring the tilting angle of the paddle, and mechanical compliance part for preventing incidental injuries. The electronics is comprised of the DAQ module to acquire the sensors data, the control module to treat the sensors data and to manage the errors, and the communication module to transmit the sensors data. After optimally designing the mechanical and electronical parts, we successfully made the paddle type end of arm tool and evaluated its performance by using specially designed jigs. The developed paddle type end of arm tool is going to be applied to the rescue robot for performance verification through field testing.

Robot arms are being increasingly used in various fields with special attention given to unmanned systems. In this research, we developed a high payload dual-arm robot, in which the forearm module is replaceable to meet the assigned task, such as object handling or lifting humans in a rescue operation. With each forearm module specialized for an assigned task (e.g. safety for rescue and redundant joints for object handling task), the robot can conduct various tasks more effectively than could be done previously. In this paper, the design of the high payload dual-arm robot with replaceable forearm function is described in detail. Two forearms are developed here. Each of forearm has quite a different goal. One of the forearms is specialized for human rescue in human familiar flat aspect and compliance parts. Other is for general heavy objects, more than 30 kg, handling with high degree of freedom more than 7.

Dual arm manipulators have been developed for the entertainment purpose such as humanoid type or the industrial application such as automatic assembly. Nowadays, there are some issues for applying the dual arm robot system into the various fields. Especially, robots can substitute human and perform the dangerous activity such as search and rescue in the battle field or disaster. In the paper, the dual arm manipulator which can be adapted to the rescue robot with the mobile platform was developed. The kinematic design was proposed for the rescue activity and the required specification was determined through the kinematic analysis and the dynamic analysis in the various conditions. The proposed dual arm manipulator was manufactured based on the vibration analysis result and its performance was proved by the experiment.

This paper introduces a dual-arm robot painter system which is capable of sketching a camera-captured image with short line segments. To express various curved edges in the image by combining line segments, we first apply edge detection algorithm to the entire image, split the edged image into small boxed pieces, and then apply Hough Transformation to each piece so that the edges inside the piece can be approximated with short line segments. To draw the picture within a reasonable time, we designed a simple dual-arm robot system and controlled both arms concurrently according to linear interpolation algorithm. From the experiments, we could verify that simple linear motions can describe various images effectively with a unique brush style.

Control and trajectory generation of a 7 DOF anthropomorphic robot arm suffer from computational complexity and singularity problem because of numerical inverse kinematics. To deal with such problems, analytical methods for a redundant robot arm have been researched to enhance the performance of inverse kinematics. In this research, we propose an analytical inverse kinematics algorithm for a 7 DOF anthropomorphic robot arm. Using this algorithm, it is possible to generate a trajectory passing through the singular points and intuitively move the elbow without regard to the end-effector pose. Performance of the proposed algorithm was verified by various simulations. It is shown that the trajectory planning using this algorithm provides correct results near the singular points and can utilize redundancy intuitively.

This study proposes the design method for the robot rotation arm which the end effector that is connected in end of the arm keeps parallel motion even though the robot arm rotates. So far, most robot arm rotates together the end effector when the arm rotates. For this, this study proposes the mechanism that the arm is linked to each 4 parallel link so that rotation is possible by 4 pins, and the rotation arm connects 2 joints of diagonal line direction to a link in each 4 joint for rotation, and designs so that can change length of the link. For verification of design, this study targeted that develop the rotation arm for medical examination that use in ophthalmology. It is important that a medical robot offers comport to patient and design compactly so that medical examination and treatment space may can be defined enough. It is designed so that all drive elements may be positioned on interior of the arm and optimization of design for main parts was carried out in this study for this. The robot arm which is developed in this study manufactured to use by medical phoropter arm, and got good result by an experiment. The robot rotation arm which is proposed in this study is judged to contribute very effectively in case use of a medical robot arm for medical examination and treatment, also the robot arm which the end effector that is connected in the end of the arm needs to keep parallel motion. And, the robot arm which is developed in this study made an application as license.