Object recognition is a prerequisite to control a soft gripper successfully grasping an unknown object. Visual and tactile recognitions are two commonly used methods in a grasping system. Visual recognition is limited if the size and weight of the objects are involved, whereas the efficiency of tactile recognition is a problem. A visual–tactile recognition method is proposed to overcome the disadvantages

Unmanned aerial vehicle route planning is a complex multiconstrained multiobjective optimization problem. Due to the complexity of various constraints and the mutual coupling between them, the expression of constraint conditions is not universal and normative. The development, maintenance, and upgrading of an existing route planning system are very difficult. In this article, by establishing the polychromatic

To satisfy the requirements of position control accuracy and allow unmanned underwater vehicle to maintain in the target zone with energy consumption as little as possible, this article proposes a flexible dynamic positioning strategy and control method, so as to extend the operating time of unmanned underwater vehicle dynamic positioning. Taking the distance between unmanned underwater vehicle and

The advantage of adversarial domain adaptation is that it uses the idea of adversarial adaptation to confuse the feature distribution of two domains and solve the problem of domain transfer in transfer learning. However, although the discriminator completely confuses the two domains, adversarial domain adaptation still cannot guarantee the consistent feature distribution of the two domains, which may

The energy storage efficiency is an important performance of a robot or a man–machine interaction device. This article will introduce the process of design and energy storage research of a variable stiffness elastic actuator with a two-elements and one actuator mod. Firstly, the principle model will be present to analyze the operation theory. Then, the simulation and experiment model will be described

Manual lifting tasks involve repetitive raising, holding and stacking movements with heavy objects. These arm movements are notable risk factors for muscle pain, fatigue, and musculoskeletal disorders in workers. An upper-limb wearable robot, as a 6-DOF dual-arm exoskeleton, which was designed to augment workers’ strength and minimize muscular activation in the arm during repetitive lifting tasks.

Nowadays, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have achieved massive improvement, which brings great convenience and advantage. Meanwhile, threats posed by them may damage public security and personal safety. This article proposes an architecture of intelligent anti-UAVs low-altitude defense system. To address the key problem of discovering UAVs, research based on multisensor information fusion is carried

Stand–sit–stand (STS) motions are the most frequently performed activities of everyday life and require extensive movement of knee joint. People suffering from knee joint disorders face difficulties in performing this motion. The compact knee exoskeleton (KE) has proven to be a viable, less complex, and cheaper alternative to the available entire lower-, upper-, and full-body exoskeletons. With growing

The long-range autonomous underwater vehicle is a new underwater vehicle with capability of stereoscopic observation of the ocean over a wide range of time series. This article proposed a novel control strategy for the long-range autonomous underwater vehicle considering the energy consumption. The vertical motion model of long-range autonomous underwater vehicle and the mathematical model of energy

This article presents a novel path planning algorithm for autonomous land vehicles. There are four main contributions: Firstly, an evaluation standard is introduced to measure the performance of different algorithms and to select appropriate parameters for the proposed algorithm. Secondly, a guideline generated by human or global planning is employed to develop the heuristic function to overcome the

Most driving torques in serial industrial robots are used to overcome the weight of the robot. Although actuators account for a large proportion of the total mass of a robot, they have yet to become a positive factor that enables the robot to achieve gravity balance. This study presents a host–parasite structure to reconstruct the distribution of actuators and achieve gravity balance in robots. First

A fixed time robust control method is presented for trajectory tracking control of quadrotor systems with motor dynamics in the presence of unmodeled disturbances and external disturbances. The recommended control method avoids the negative effect to the quadrotor system caused by motor dynamic which is considered as first-order dynamic with dynamic disturbance. And fixed time extended state observer

A tensegrity is a self-stressed pin-jointed system consisting of tensile members and compressive members. As its shape can be actively controlled by changing the prestress of its members, it has great potential to be used as a shape-controllable locomotive system. Particularly, the six-strut spherical tensegrity has been studied intensively as a rolling locomotive system. In this study, the rolling

Due to the absorption and scattering effect on light when traveling in water, underwater images exhibit serious weakening such as color deviation, low contrast, and blurry details. Traditional algorithms have certain limitations in the case of these images with varying degrees of fuzziness and color deviation. To address these problems, a new approach for single underwater image enhancement based on

This article mainly considers the problem of trajectory tracking control problem of quad-rotor system with velocity constrain under the consideration of safety. A model-based nonlinear controller is proposed which can guarantee not only the asymptotical stability for control system but also the velocity under a safe range. Firstly, based on backstepping design, a position tracking controller with velocity

With the development of technology, human motion capture data have been widely used in the fields of human–computer interaction, interactive entertainment, education, and medical treatment. As a problem in the field of computer vision, human motion recognition has become a key technology in somatosensory games, security protection, and multimedia information retrieval. Therefore, it is important to

Path planning is of great significance in motion planning and cooperative navigation of multiple robots. Nevertheless, because of its high complexity and nondeterministic polynomial time hard nature, efficiently tackling with the issue of multi-robot path planning remains greatly challenging. To this end, enhancing a coevolution mechanism and an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm

Pedestrian detection is a particular case of object detection that helps to reduce accidents in advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous vehicles. It is not an easy task because of the variability of the objects and the time constraints. A performance comparison of object detection methods, including both GPU and non-GPU implementations over a variety of on-road specific databases, is provided

This article proposes a new reconfigurable parallel mechanism using a spatial overconstrained platform. This proposed mechanism can be used as a machine tool. The mobility is analyzed by Screw Theory. The inverse kinematic model is established by applying the closed-loop equation. Next, the dynamic model of the presented mechanism is established by Lagrange formulation. To control the presented mechanism

The underwater environment is extremely complex and variable, which makes it difficult for underwater robots detecting or recognizing surroundings using images acquired with cameras. Ghost imaging as a new imaging technique has attracted much attention due to its special physical properties and potential for imaging of objects in optically harsh or noisy environments. In this work, we experimentally

Multijoint industrial robots can be used for 3D printing to manufacture the complex freeform surfaces. The postprocessing is the basis of the precise printing. Due to the nonlinear motion of the rotational joint, nonlinear error is inevitable in multijoint industrial robots. In this article, the postprocessing and the path optimization based on the nonlinear errors are proposed to improve the accuracy

Aiming at a long-term formation-keeping problem for the satellite swarm, the concept of a loosely displaced formation is proposed in this article. On this basis, a continuous low-thrust control strategy for maintaining the loosely displaced formation is designed. The control objective is to reduce more fuel consumption during the formation-keeping. For achieving that, we proposed a forward-feedback

Multiagent coordination is highly desirable with many uses in a variety of tasks. In nature, the phenomenon of coordinated flocking is highly common with applications related to defending or escaping from predators. In this article, a hybrid multiagent system that integrates consensus, cooperative learning, and flocking control to determine the direction of attacking predators and learns to flock away

In a given manufacturing setting where workers or robots are coexisting in a confined area and their movements are not coordinated due to loss in communication or because they are freely ranging relative to each other, the development of an onboard safeguard system for a robot becomes a necessity to reduce accidents while the production efficiency is uncompromised. This article develops a two-dimensional

To improve the robustness performance of dynamic sliding mode control to the time-varying uncertainties without the upper bound information in a hybrid robot system, a global robust super-twisting algorithm with adaptive switching gains is proposed. The main contributions are as follows: (1) for the problem that the robustness of the sliding mode control system is not guaranteed in the reaching phase

Natural gas leakage on offshore platforms has a great impact on safety production, and effective and reasonable leakage detection methods can prevent the harm caused by natural gas leakage. This article proposes a method based on ant colony optimization (ACO) for multirobots to collaboratively search for leaking natural gas sources on offshore platforms. First, analyze the structure and environment

To enhance the capability of neural networks, research on attention mechanism have been deepened. In this area, attention modules make forward inference along channel dimension and spatial dimension sequentially, parallelly, or simultaneously. However, we have found that spatial attention modules mainly apply convolution layers to generate attention maps, which aggregate feature responses only based

Cooperative tracking control problem of multiple water–land amphibious robots is discussed in this article with consideration of unknown nonlinear dynamics. Firstly, the amphibious robot dynamic model is formulated as an uncoupled nonlinear one in horizontal plane through eliminating relatively small sway velocity of the platform. Then cooperative tracking control algorithm is proposed with a two-stage

In robotics, the tough problem about the dynamic target capturing consists of tracking the target by the robot manipulator and grasping the target by the robot finger. For the sake of space, this article deals with only the first problem, tracking the dynamic target by the robot manipulator. The traditional approaches of capturing the dynamic target may work well when they are employed in low-dimensional

Inspired by the phototropism of plants, a novel variant of the rapidly exploring random tree algorithm as called phototropism rapidly exploring random tree is proposed. The phototropism rapidly exploring random tree algorithm expands less tree nodes during the exploration period and has shorter path length than the original rapidly exploring random tree algorithm. In the algorithm, a virtual light

Vision-based object detection technology plays a very important role in the field of computer vision. It is widely used in many machine vision applications. However, in the specific application scenarios, like a solid waste sorting system, it is very difficult to obtain good accuracy due to the color information of objects that is badly damaged. In this work, we propose a novel multimodal convolutional

Based on evidence from the previous research in rehabilitation robot control strategies, we found that the common feature of the effective control strategies to promote subjects’ engagement is creating a reward–punishment feedback mechanism. This article proposes a reward–punishment feedback control strategy based on energy information. Firstly, an engagement estimated approach based on energy information

Due to the clutter background motion, accurate moving object segmentation in unconstrained videos remains a significant open problem, especially for the slow-moving object. This article proposes an accurate moving object segmentation method based on robust seed selection. The seed pixels of the object and background are selected robustly by using the optical flow cues. Firstly, this article detects

Generating response with both coherence and diversity is a challenging task in generation-based chatbots. It is more difficult to improve the coherence and diversity of dialog generation at the same time in the response generation model. In this article, we propose an improved method that improves the coherence and diversity of dialog generation by changing the model to use gamma sampling and adding

Modeling and control for a novel coaxial ducted fan aerial robot in-ground-effect is presented in this article. Based on experiments using the ducted fan bench test, the fitting curve of the ground effect thrust of the ducted fan aerial robot at different heights is obtained. In addition, the flow field simulation results of the prototype with ground effect at different heights can be obtained using

Many pieces of information are included in the front region of a vehicle, especially in windshield and bumper regions. Thus, windshield or bumper region detection is making sense to extract useful information. But the existing windshield and bumper detection methods based on traditional artificial features are not robust enough. Those features may become invalid in many real situations (e.g. occlude

Planning collision-free trajectories is essential for wheeled mobile robots operating in dynamic environments safely and efficiently. Most current trajectory generation methods focus on achieving optimal trajectories in static maps and considering dynamic obstacles as static depending on the precise motion estimation of the obstacles. However, in realistic applications, dealing with dynamic obstacles

Grasp using a prosthetic hand in real life can be a difficult task. The amputee users are often capable of planning the reaching trajectory and hand grasp location selection, however, failed in precise finger movements, such as adapting the fingers to the surface of the object without excessive force. It is much efficient to leave that part to the machine autonomy. In order to combine the intention

A nonlinear robust control method for the trajectory tracking of the underwater vehicle and manipulator system that operates in the presence of external current disturbances is proposed using double closed-loop integral sliding mode control. The designed controller uses a double closed-loop control structure to track the desired trajectory in the joint space of the underwater vehicle and manipulator

Manned underwater robot is an important platform to carry various sensors and working tools to finish the in situ measurement and sampling in the deep sea. Due to its limited loading capacity, the device it will be carried, usually, requires to be able to dive to its working depth with a small volume and weight. According to the application requirements of deep-sea sediment temperature gradient in

Aiming at the problems of common methods in trotting gait control of a load-carrying quadruped walking vehicle, a control method, combining virtual model and centroidal dynamics, is proposed. The control of the walking vehicle is divided into two parts, meaning the motion control of the vehicle body and the motion control of the swing leg. The virtual model control method is used to work out the accelerations

Under the complex agricultural operation environment, reliable navigation system is the basic guarantee to realize the agricultural robot automated operation. This study focuses on improving navigation accuracy and control accuracy and conducts related research on autonomous navigation control of agricultural robots. This article discusses the advantages of using strict convergence criteria and combining

Nowadays, mobile robotic systems use many complex electronic devices that employ a wide range of control and signal processing techniques to capture and process their environment in real time. Mobile robots use various types of sensory parts, such as CCD cameras, laser scanners, infrared, and ultrasonic sensors, as well as IMU and GPS devices. Also, a combination of the aforementioned sensory parts

In this article, a robust adaptive tracking controller is developed for robot manipulators with uncertain dynamics using radial basis function neural network. The design of tracking control systems for robot manipulators is a highly challenging task due to external disturbance and the uncertainties in their dynamics. The improved radial basis function neural network is chosen to approximate the uncertain

The multivariate statistical method such as principal component analysis based on linear dimension reduction and kernel principal component analysis based on nonlinear dimension reduction as the modified principal component analysis method are commonly used. Because of the diversity and correlation of robotic global performance indexes, the two multivariate statistical methods principal component analysis

This article presents a collision avoidance system for multiple robots based on the current autonomous car collision avoidance system. The purpose of the system is to improve the current autonomous car collision avoidance system by including data input of other vehicles’ velocity and positioning via vehicle-to-vehicle communication into the current autonomous car collision avoidance system. There are

When a segment of a flexible link of a flexible robot is currently sliding through a prismatic joint, it is usually assumed that the elastic deformation of the segment equals to zero. This is a kind of time-dependent boundary condition when formulating the dynamics model of a flexible robot consisting of prismatic joints. Hence, the dynamic modeling and especially the inverse dynamic analysis of the

This article addresses a problem in standard broadcast control framework which leads to an unstable solution in a certain motion-coordination task. First, the unstable phenomenon in a certain motion-coordination task is illustrated using standard broadcast control framework. This issue calls for modification to the standard broadcast control framework by limiting the norm of the update vector of robots’

Wheeled walking mechanism has the advantages of high mobility and low rolling resistance, but it is easy to sink and slip when working in soft and muddy terrain. Tracked walking mechanism has the advantages of high passability and stability, but it has the problems of difficult steering and slow walking speed. In order to make the walking mechanism possess a combination of passability, stability, and

The sonar image segmentation is needed such as in underwater object orientation and recognition, in collision prevention and navigation of underwater robots, in underwater investigation and rescue, in seafloor object seeking, in seafloor salvage, and in marine military affairs like torpedo detection. The wavelet-based methods have the ability of multiscale and multiresolution, and they are apt at edge

Intelligent vehicles should be able to detect various obstacles and also identify their types so that the vehicles can take an appropriate level of protection and intervention. This article presents a method of detecting and classifying multiclass obstacles for intelligent vehicles. A stereovision-based method is used to segment obstacles from traffic background and measure three-dimensional geometrical

Efficient and robust sound source recognition and localization is one of the basic techniques for humanoid robots in terms of reaction to environments. Due to the fixed sensor arrays and limited computation resources in humanoid robots, there comes challenge for sound source recognition and localization. This article proposes a sound source recognition and localization framework to realize real-time

A model predictive control approach is proposed for path following of underactuated surface ships with input saturation, parameters uncertainties, and environmental disturbances. An Euler iterative algorithm is used to reduce the calculation amount of model predictive control. The matter of input saturation is addressed naturally and flexibly by taking advantage of model predictive control. The mathematical

This article presents a software layer to abstract users of unmanned aerial vehicles from the specific hardware of the platform and the autopilot interfaces. The main objective of our unmanned aerial vehicle abstraction layer (UAL) is to simplify the development and testing of higher-level algorithms in aerial robotics by trying to standardize and simplify the interfaces with the unmanned aerial vehicles

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) have been regarded as a promising means for the future delivery industry by many logistic companies. Several AGV-based delivery systems have been proposed, but they generally have drawbacks in delivering and locating baggage by magnet line, such as the high maintenance cost, and it is hard to change the trajectory of AGV. This article considers using multi-AGVs as delivery

This article presents a method for generating the locomotion of a mobile manipulator that globally minimizes the weighted generalized momentum. The method utilizes the calculus of variation setting to address the problem for which the optimal trajectory may be computed by solving the initial value problem of the system of ordinary differential equations rather than the two-point boundary value problem

Effectively and efficiently recognizing multi-scale objects is one of the key challenges of utilizing deep convolutional neural network to the object detection field. YOLOv3 (You only look once v3) is the state-of-the-art object detector with good performance in both aspects of accuracy and speed; however, the scale variation is still the challenging problem which needs to be improved. Considering

Facial landmark localization is still a challenge task in the unconstrained environment with influences of significant variation conditions such as facial pose, shape, expression, illumination, and occlusions. In this work, we present an improved boundary-aware face alignment method by using stacked dense U-Nets. The proposed method consists of two stages: a boundary heatmap estimation stage to learn

The developing time-of-flight (TOF) camera is an attractive device for the robot vision system to capture real-time three-dimensional (3D) images, but the sensor suffers from the limit of low resolution and precision of images. This article proposes an approach to automatic generation of an imaging model in the 3D space for error correction. Through observation data, an initial coarse model of the

The object of this article is to design an observer-based adaptive neural network sliding mode controller for active suspension systems. A general nonlinear suspension model is established, and the electrohydraulic actuator dynamics are considered. The proposed controller is decomposed into two loops. Since the dynamics of the actuator is assumed highly nonlinear with uncertainties, the adaptive neural