Juniper Publishers-Journal of Robotics Engineering

Juniper Publishers- Journal of Robotics Introduction Robots fabricated by soft materials can provide higher flexibility and thus better safety while interacting with natural objects with low stiffness such as food and human beings. With the growth of three-dimensional (3D) printing, it is even possible to directly fabricate soft robots [1,2] with complex structures and multiple materials realizing highly dexterous tasks like human-interactive grasping and confined area detection [3]. However, with such increased degrees of freedom (DoF), the design of soft robots becomes a very difficult task. It can be made possible by integrating simulation into the design phase. However, the shape deformation comes from many different and complex factors including manufacturing process, material properties, actuation, etc. Especially with the limited understanding of layer-based additive process in AM, it is challenging to formulate a complete mathematical model for the simul...

Juniper Publishers- Journal of Robotics Abstract Although, the problem of industrial robot reliability is closely related to machine reliability and is well known and described in the literature, it is also more complex and connected with safety requirements and specific robot related problems (near failure situations, human errors, software failures, calibration, singularity, etc.).Compared to the first robot generation, the modern robots are more advanced, functional and reliable. Some robot’s producers declare very high robot working time without failures, but there are fewer publications about the real robot reliability and about occurring failures. Some surveys show that not every robot user has monitoring and collects data about robot failures. The practice show, that the most unreliable components are in the robot’s equipment, including grippers, tools, sensors, wiring, which are often custom made for different purposes. The lifecycle of a typical indus...

Juniper Publishers- Journal of Robotics Abstract The prevailing methodology in designing adaptive controllers for strongly nonlinear systems is based on Lyapunov’s PhD Thesis he defended in 1892 to study the stability of motion of systems for the solution of the equations of motion of which no closed form analytical solutions exist. The adaptive robot controllers developed in the nineties of the 20thcentury guarantee global (often asymptotic) stability of the controlled system by using his ingenious Direct Method that introduces a Lyapunov function for the behavior of which relatively simple numerical limitations have to be proved. Though for various problem classes typical Lyapunov function candidates are available, the application of this method requires far more knowledge than the implementation of some algorithm. Besides requiring creative designer’s abilities, it often requires too much because it works with satisfactory conditionsinstead of necessary and s...