Forward and Inverse Dynamics of a Unicycle-Like Mobile Robot

Buffering Performance Analysis of an Ostrich-like Leg Based on a Seven-Link Parallel Mechanism

As one of the fastest running animals on land, the ostrich’s excellent athletic ability benefits from its unique leg structure. Based on the idea of bionics, this paper intends to obtain a kind of robotic leg structure with a similar buffering capacity to that of the ostrich. For this purpose, the structural characteristics of a seven-link parallel mechanism are analyzed firstly, having some specific features similar to ostrich legs, such as the center of mass (COM) located at the root of the leg, a large folding/unfolding ratio, and so on. Then, the kinematic model of the bionic leg is established, and the energy storage of the flexible parts of the leg is investigated. Finally, an impact experiment of the structure onto the ground is carried out to verify the accuracy of the established kinematic model. This paper systematically reveals the nonlinear law of the elasticity of an ostrich-like leg and provides the buffering performance characteristics of the leg in the process of hitting the ground, based on its elastic properties by the kinematic model and the experiment.

A Parametric Study of a Deep Reinforcement Learning Control System Applied to the Swing-Up Problem of the Cart-Pole

In this investigation, the nonlinear swing-up problem associated with the cart-pole system modeled as a multibody dynamical system is solved by developing a deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) controller. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis of the deep RL controller applied to the cart-pole swing-up problem is carried out. To this end, the influence of modifying the physical properties of the system and the presence of dry friction forces are analyzed employing the cumulative reward during the task. Extreme limits for the modifications of the parameters are determined to prove that the neural network architecture employed in this work features enough learning capability to handle the task under modifications as high as 90% on the pendulum mass, as well as a 100% increment on the cart mass. As expected, the presence of dry friction greatly affects the performance of the controller. However, a post-training of the agent in the modified environment takes only thirty-nine episodes to find the optimal control policy, resulting in a promising path for further developments of robust controllers.

Robust control design for home pension service mobile robots with passive and servo constraints

This paper presents a novel robust control design for a class of home pension service mobile robots (HPSMRs) with non-holonomic passive constraints, based on the Udwadia-Kalaba theory and Udwadia control. The approach has two portions: dynamics modeling and robust control design. The Udwadia-Kalaba theory is employed to deal with the non-holonomic passive constraints. The frame of the Udwadia control is employed to design the robust control to tracking the servo constraints. The designed approach is easy to implement because the analytical solution of the control force can explicitly be obtained even if the non-holonomic passive constraints exists. The uniform boundedness and uniform ultimate boundedness are demonstrated by the theoretical analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified through the numerical simulation by a HPSMR.

A Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of Different Mobile Manipulators Used as Displaceable 3D Printers of Building Elements for the Construction Industry

The construction industry is currently technologically challenged to incorporate new developments for enhancing the process, such as the use of 3D printing for complex building structures, which is the aim of this brief. To do so, we show a systematic study regarding the usability and performance of mobile manipulators as displaceable 3D printing machinery in construction sites, with emphasis on the three main different existing mobile platforms: the car-like, the unicycle and the omnidirectional (mecanum wheeled), with an UR5 manipulator on them. To evaluate its performance, we propose the printing of the following building elements: helical, square, circular and mesh, with different sizes. As metrics, we consider the total control effort observed in the robots and the total tracking error associated with the energy consumed in the activity to get a more sustainable process. In addition, to further test our work, we constrained the robot workspace thus resembling real life construction sites. In general, the statistical results show that the omnidirectional platform presents the best results –lowest tracking error and lowest control effort– for circular, helicoidal and mesh building elements; and car-like platform shows the best results for square-like building element. Then, an innovative performance analysis is achieved for the printing of building elements, with a contribution to the reduction of energy consumption.