As underwater operation equipment, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have received widespread attention in the trend of unmanned and intelligent operations. They play an increasingly important role in offshore oil exploration, underwater rescue, military reconnaissance, seabed salvage, and marine scientific research. The research and application of AUVs is a systematic … [Read more...] about An Unmanned Surface Vehicle for the Launch and Recovery of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles: A Novel Design
Safety
Opportunistic (Re)planning for Long-Term Deep-Ocean Inspection: An Autonomous Underwater Architecture
Robots are increasingly used in subsea environments because of their positive impact on human safety and operational capabilities in the deep ocean. However, achieving full autonomy remains challenging because of the extreme conditions they encounter. In this context, we propose an autonomous underwater architecture for long-term deep-ocean inspection that robustly plans … [Read more...] about Opportunistic (Re)planning for Long-Term Deep-Ocean Inspection: An Autonomous Underwater Architecture
An Intelligent Rehabilitation Robot With Passive and Active Direct Switching Training
The demand for walking training robots has increased owing to a serious shortage of rehabilitation physiotherapists. However, the intelligence level of existing rehabilitation training robots is low; these robots cannot realize a direct switch between passive and active training, which makes rehabilitees lack interest in training and deteriorates the effect of rehabilitation … [Read more...] about An Intelligent Rehabilitation Robot With Passive and Active Direct Switching Training
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