Call2 Monitoring HUROBIN

Public Summary Month 7/2012

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 10:06:49 GMT

During the present monitoring period, the following research activities within the HUROBIN experiment were carried out:

Low level control of the servo motors in the Simulink scheme was improved, along with S-function including communication processes using the USB-CAN interface.
Analysis of the robotic arm’s compliance based on data from the JR3 force/torque sensor was completed. A new set of reference angles for each motor was computed using the Jacobian matrix.

Task 3 "Design and development of control strategy for the robotic platform" represent an ongoing activity aimed at achieving Milestone M3 “Implementation of a control strategy for the cooperative task” which will be presumably achieved on month 42. Task 6 "Dissemination" represents an ongoing research activity as well.

Public Summary Month 5/2012

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 13:47:12 GMT

During the present monitoring period the following research activities within the HUROBIN experiment were carried out:

Dataglove, motion tracker and JR3 force/torque sensor integration. The two Matlab S-functions for UDP communication with tracker and dataglove were implemented and integrated in a unique Simulink scheme, including S-function for managing JR3 force/torque sensor placed on the wrist joint.
Low level control of the servo motors in the above mentioned Simulink scheme was implemented, along with S-function including communication processes using USB-CAN. The low level communication of the servo motors for implementing an impedence-based control was analyzed.

Task 2 "Dataglove and tracker integration with robotic arm" is completed: Milestone M2 “Dataglove and tracker integration with robotic arm” is achieved. Task 3 "Design and development of control strategy for the robotic platform" represent an ongoing activity aimed at achieving Milestone M3 “Implementation of a control strategy for the cooperative task” (expected on month 43). Task 6 "Dissemination" is ongoing as well.

Public Summary Month 4/2012

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:21:07 GMT

During the present monitoring period the research activities carried out within the HUROBIN experiment can be divided into the following phases:

Experimental tests of the MATLAB S-function including communication part (open, initialize and close IXXAT USB-CAN compact device communication) and low-level control of servo-motors (start motors, low- level position control of the joints, velocities setting, motors stopping, motors braking). New functionalities, such as output of current values and motors positions, were also added.
Final testing of the embedded MATLAB function “Damped Least Square for inverse kinematics” for tuning parameters, including analysis and solution of possible “worst cases”.
Data acquisition from Motion tracker and Dataglove.

The experimental setup is shown in Figure 1.

Figura 1. The experimental setup: a) Dataglove, b) Control desktop PC, c) Motion tracker, d) Communication laptop PC, e) Robotic platform

Task 2 "Dataglove and tracker integration with robotic arm" and Task 3 "Design and development of control strategy for the robotic platform" represent ongoing activities aimed at achieving Milestone M2 “Dataglove and tracker integration with robotic arm”. Task 6 "Dissemination" is ongoing as well.

Public Summary Month 1/2012

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:54:45 GMT

During this monitoring period, the research activities carried out within the HUROBIN experiment have focused on (1) the implementation of software solutions for controlling the robotic platform at low level and (2) the validation tests for collecting data from the force/torque sensor positioned at the robot’s end-effector.

Current research tasks are addressed to (1) the integration of dataglove and motion tracker with the robotic platform and arm and (2) the design and development of control strategy for safe human-robot interaction.

Public Summary Month 11/2011

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:50:34 GMT

During this monitoring period the research activities of the HUROBIN experiment can be divided in two phases:

Setup of the robotic arm (Figure 1) and tests;
Design of control strategies for human-robot cooperative tasks.

Figure 1. The HUROBIN robotic arm

Public Summary Month 10/2011

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:36:07 GMT

The robotic TLArm platform (Telerobot Srl), 7 degrees of freedom (DoF), was delivered on October 7, 2011 at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna at Polo Sant'Anna Valdera (Pontedera, Italy).

During the last two months, the following activities were carried out:

1) Computation of direct and inverse kinematics of TLArm;

2) Computation of direct and inverse differential kinematics of TLArm;

3) Singularity and redundancy analysis;

4) Iterative method for the implementation of the inverse kinematics (under Simulink environment);

5) Simulations (under Matlab environment).

Public Summary Month 7/2011

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 08:32:08 GMT

The main goal of the experiment (Application development) is focused on safe human-robot cooperation. In the proposed experiment, the robot co-worker interacts with a human operator to achieve the common goal of manipulating shared objects. The robot will have to adapt its configuration and dynamics to the conditions imposed by the human operator.

A 7-DOF manipulator and a gripper (Figure 1) will be used in combination with a dataglove (Figure 2), as a Human-Machine Interface (HMI) and a motion tracker (Figure 3), to perform human-robot cooperative manipulation tasks. Objects characterized by different shapes (i.e., plate, bar, cylinder) and length will be used. Sensor failures and adverse conditions will be considered to test the safety of the human-robot cooperative tasks. In fact, the tracker will be used by the human agent in order to track the trajectory of the shared object while the robot position sensors will be selectively ignored to simulate sensor failures. The robot will be expected to adapt the trajectory using the load cell and the tracker will be used to make sure that the human operator remains safe while the control strategy is tested.

Specific control strategies will be developed, implemented and validated during the experiment in order to achieve a safe and compliant interaction between the robot and the human operator.

The experiment is coordinated by the BioRobotics Institute at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa, Italy) and it is carried out in collaboration with a single partner, Humanware Srl (Pisa, Italy), a company specialized in the design and development of advanced hardware and software HMI.

Figure 1. The robotic platform Figure 2. The dataglove Figure 3. The tracker