Population aging has highlighted the significance of developing home-care robots to assist human life. However, traditional home-care robots work according to fixed procedures, which lack human–robot interaction to mimic human hand action. Human–robot interfaces provide an opportunity for interactions between robots and users, which play an important role in home-care robots. … [Read more...] about Electronic Skin as Human–Robot Interface for Human Grasp Recognition in Home-Care Robots: Introducing a Complete Set of Resources
Control systems
Open Source Dual-Purpose Acrobot and Pendubot Platform: Benchmarking Control Algorithms for Underactuated Robotics
Recent interest in the control of underactuated robots has surged significantly due to the impressive athletic behaviors shown by robots developed by, e.g., Boston Dynamics ( https://www.bostondynamics.com ), Agility Robotics ( https://agilityrobotics.com/robots ), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [1] . This gives rise to the need for canonical robotic hardware … [Read more...] about Open Source Dual-Purpose Acrobot and Pendubot Platform: Benchmarking Control Algorithms for Underactuated Robotics
Safety and Efficiency in Robotics: The Control Barrier Functions Approach
This article aims at presenting an introductory overview of the theoretical framework of control barrier functions (CBFs) and of their application to the design of safety-related controllers for robotic systems. The article starts by describing the basic concepts of CBFs and how they can be used to build optimization problems embedding CBF-based constraints, whose solutions … [Read more...] about Safety and Efficiency in Robotics: The Control Barrier Functions Approach
Learning Fast and Precise Pixel-to-Torque Control: A Platform for Reproducible Research of Learning on Hardware
In the field, robots often need to operate in unknown and unstructured environments, where accurate sensing and state estimation (SE) become a major challenge. Cameras have been used with great success in mapping and planning in such environments [1] as well as complex but quasi-static tasks, such as grasping [2], but are rarely integrated into the control loop for unstable … [Read more...] about Learning Fast and Precise Pixel-to-Torque Control: A Platform for Reproducible Research of Learning on Hardware
A RoboStack Tutorial: Using the Robot Operating System Alongside the Conda and Jupyter Data Science Ecosystems
The Robot Operating System (ROS) has become the de facto standard middleware in the robotics community [1]. ROS bundles everything, from low-level drivers to tools that transform among coordinate systems, to state-of-the-art perception and control algorithms. One of ROS’s key merits is the rich ecosystem of standardized tools to build and distribute ROS-based software. For … [Read more...] about A RoboStack Tutorial: Using the Robot Operating System Alongside the Conda and Jupyter Data Science Ecosystems
