Reconfigurable Integrated Multirobot Exploration System (RIMRES): Heterogeneous Modular Reconfigurable Robots for Space Exploration

Human-AI teams-Challenges for a team-centered AI at work

As part of the Special Issue topic "Human-Centered AI at Work: Common Ground in Theories and Methods," we present a perspective article that looks at human-AI teamwork from a team-centered AI perspective, i. e., we highlight important design aspects that the technology needs to fulfill in order to be accepted by humans and to be fully utilized in the role of a team member in teamwork. Drawing from the model of an idealized teamwork process, we discuss the teamwork requirements for successful human-AI teaming in interdependent and complex work domains, including e.g., responsiveness, situation awareness, and flexible decision-making. We emphasize the need for team-centered AI that aligns goals, communication, and decision making with humans, and outline the requirements for such team-centered AI from a technical perspective, such as cognitive competence, reinforcement learning, and semantic communication. In doing so, we highlight the challenges and open questions associated with its implementation that need to be solved in order to enable effective human-AI teaming.

TeCVP: A Time-Efficient Control Method for a Hexapod Wheel-Legged Robot Based on Velocity Planning

Addressing the problem that control methods of wheel-legged robots for future Mars exploration missions are too complex, a time-efficient control method based on velocity planning for a hexapod wheel-legged robot is proposed in this paper, which is named time-efficient control based on velocity planning (TeCVP). When the foot end or wheel at knee comes into contact with the ground, the desired velocity of the foot end or knee is transformed according to the velocity transformation of the rigid body from the desired velocity of the torso which is obtained by the deviation of torso position and posture. Furthermore, the torques of joints can be obtained by impedance control. When suspended, the leg is regarded as a system consisting of a virtual spring and a virtual damper to realize control of legs in the swing phase. In addition, leg sequences of switching motion between wheeled configuration and legged configuration are planned. According to a complexity analysis, velocity planning control has lower time complexity and less times of multiplication and addition compared with virtual model control. In addition, simulations show that velocity planning control can realize stable periodic gait motion, wheel-leg switching motion and wheeled motion and the operation time of velocity planning control is about 33.89% less than that of virtual model control, which promises a great prospect for velocity planning control in future planetary exploration missions.

Insect-Inspired Robots: Bridging Biological and Artificial Systems

This review article aims to address common research questions in hexapod robotics. How can we build intelligent autonomous hexapod robots that can exploit their biomechanics, morphology, and computational systems, to achieve autonomy, adaptability, and energy efficiency comparable to small living creatures, such as insects? Are insects good models for building such intelligent hexapod robots because they are the only animals with six legs? This review article is divided into three main sections to address these questions, as well as to assist roboticists in identifying relevant and future directions in the field of hexapod robotics over the next decade. After an introduction in section (1), the sections will respectively cover the following three key areas: (2) biomechanics focused on the design of smart legs; (3) locomotion control; and (4) high-level cognition control. These interconnected and interdependent areas are all crucial to improving the level of performance of hexapod robotics in terms of energy efficiency, terrain adaptability, autonomy, and operational range. We will also discuss how the next generation of bioroboticists will be able to transfer knowledge from biology to robotics and vice versa.

A survey of formation control and motion planning of multiple unmanned vehicles

The increasing deployment of multiple unmanned vehicles systems has generated large research interest in recent decades. This paper therefore provides a detailed survey to review a range of techniques related to the operation of multi-vehicle systems in different environmental domains, including land based, aerospace and marine with the specific focuses placed on formation control and cooperative motion planning. Differing from other related papers, this paper pays a special attention to the collision avoidance problem and specifically discusses and reviews those methods that adopt flexible formation shape to achieve collision avoidance for multi-vehicle systems. In the conclusions, some open research areas with suggested technologies have been proposed to facilitate the future research development.