The second edition of this handbook provides a state-of-the-art cover view on the various aspects in the rapidly developing field of robotics. Reaching for the human frontier, robotics is vigorously ...engaged in the growing challenges of new emerging domains. Interacting, exploring, and working with humans, the new generation of robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The credible prospect of practical robots among humans is the result of the scientific endeavour of a half a century of robotic developments that established robotics as a modern scientific discipline. The ongoing vibrant expansion and strong growth of the field during the last decade has fueled this second edition of the Springer Handbook of Robotics. The first edition of the handbook soon became a landmark in robotics publishing and won the American Association of Publishers PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics as well as the organization's Award for Engineering & Technology.
The second edition of the handbook, edited by two internationally renowned scientists with the support of an outstanding team of seven part editors and more than 200 authors, continues to be an authoritative reference for robotics researchers, newcomers to the field, and scholars from related disciplines. The contents have been restructured to achieve four main objectives: the enlargement of foundational topics for robotics, the enlightenment of design of various types of robotic systems, the extension of the treatment on robots moving in the environment, and the enrichment of advanced robotics applications. Further to an extensive update, fifteen new chapters have been introduced on emerging topics, and a new generation of authors have joined the handbook's team.
A novel addition to the second edition is a comprehensive collection of multimedia references to more than 700 videos, which bring valuable insight into the contents. The videos can be viewed directly augmented into the text with a smartphone or tablet using a unique and specially designed app.
The first COVID-19 case in Brazil was confirmed on February 25, 2020. On March 16, the state's governor declared public health emergency in the city of Rio de Janeiro and partial lockdown measures ...came into force a week later. The main goal of this work is to discuss the impact of the measures on the air quality of the city by comparing the particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone concentrations determined during the partial lockdown with values obtained in the same period of 2019 and also with the weeks prior to the virus outbreak. Concentrations varied with substantial differences among pollutants and also among the three studied monitoring stations. CO levels showed the most significant reductions (30.3–48.5%) since they were related to light-duty vehicular emissions. NO2 also showed reductions while PM10 levels were only reduced in the first lockdown week. In April, an increase in vehicular flux and movement of people was observed mainly as a consequence of the lack of consensus about the importance and need of social distancing and lockdown. Ozone concentrations increased probably due to the decrease in nitrogen oxides level. When comparing with the same period of 2019, NO2 and CO median values were 24.1–32.9 and 37.0–43.6% lower. Meteorological interferences, mainly the transport of pollutants from the industrial areas might have also impacted the results.
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•CO levels showed the most significant reductions during the partial lockdown.•NO2 decreased in a lower extent, due to industrial and diesel input.•PM10 levels were only reduced during the first partial lockout week.•Ozone increased due to the decrease in nitrogen oxides level in a VOC-controlled scenario.
An atlas of physical human–robot interaction De Santis, Agostino; Siciliano, Bruno; De Luca, Alessandro ...
Mechanism and machine theory,
03/2008, Volume:
43, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
A broad spectrum of issues have to be addressed in order to tackle the problem of a safe and dependable physical Human–Robot Interaction (pHRI). In the immediate future, metrics related to safety and ...dependability have to be found in order to successfully introduce robots in everyday enviornments. While there are certainly also “cognitive” issues involved, due to the human perception of the robot (and vice versa), and other objective metrics related to fault detection and isolation, our discussion focuses on the peculiar aspects of “physical” interaction with robots. In particular, safety and dependability are the underlying evaluation criteria for mechanical design, actuation, and control architectures. Mechanical and control issues are discussed with emphasis on techniques that provide safety in an intrinsic way or by means of control components. Attention is devoted to dependability, mainly related to sensors, control architectures, and fault handling and tolerance. Suggestions are provided to draft metrics for evaluating safety and dependability in pHRI, and references to the works of the scientific groups involved in the pHRI research complete the study. The present atlas is a result of the EURON perspective research project “Physical Human–Robot Interaction in anthropic DOMains (PHRIDOM)”, aimed at charting the new territory of pHRI, and constitutes the scientific basis for the ongoing STReP project “Physical Human–Robot Interaction: depENDability and Safety (PHRIENDS)”, aimed at developing key components for the next generation of robots, designed to share their environment with people.
This paper describes the development of a remote handling control of an anthropomorphic robotic hand, the SCHUNK S5FH, using the human hand as master by measuring its motion with OptiTrack ...Technology. The goal of this work is to enhance manipulation studies on the human hand and to instantly transfer those studies on robotic hands. A preliminary study on methods and devices used for fingers tracking led to the choice of a simplified kinematic model of the human hand on the basis of the available motion tracking system. Using the same criteria, the analysis of protocols for markers allocation led to define the number and a method for their arrangement on the fingers and palm. In order to overcome the limitation of the Motion Capture System, a method for identification and labeling has been developed according to their anatomical arrangement. Afterwards, the tracking is performed using the constraints between marker positions on the kinematic chain of the hand and a dynamic labeling algorithm robust with respect to noise, outliers and loss of markers. The validation is performed using the right hand of different subjects and considering different tasks involving flexion/extension and abduction/adduction of fingers and thumb opposition. For testing and validation, preliminary studies on synergies for manipulation tasks such as screwing a cup, has been conducted on the human hand and transferred on the robotic hand.
•Remote control of an anthropomorphic robotic hand by tracking human hand motion.•Enhance manipulation studies on the human hand and transfer them to robotic hands.•A simplified human hand kinematic model is chosen according to the tracking method.•A marker protocol solution that minimize the number of utilized markers is developed.•An algorithm for dynamic labeling and accurate reconstruction of the movement.
A method for fast visual grasping of unknown objects with a multifingered robotic hand is presented in this paper. The algorithm is composed of an object surface reconstruction algorithm and a local ...grasp planner, evolving in parallel. The reconstruction algorithm makes use of images taken by a camera carried by the robot arm. A virtual elastic reconstruction surface is placed around the object. The surface shrinks toward the object until some points intercept the object visual hull. Then, attractive forces with respect to the border of the visual hull are generated so as to compensate for the elastic forces: when an equilibrium between those forces is reached, the surface takes the form of the object shape. Running in parallel to the reconstruction algorithm, the grasp planner moves the fingertips on the current available reconstruction surface, toward points which are optimal (in a local sense) with respect to a number of indices weighting both the grasp quality and the kinematics configuration of the hand. This method, referred to as parallel visual grasp, may represent a valid candidate for applications where online grasp planning is required. A number of experiments are presented, showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
This paper presents a new procedure to design a control law using the classical interconnection and damping assignment technique within the passivity-based port-Hamiltonian framework. The sought goal ...is to reduce the complexity of solving the so-called matching equations. The proposed approach is applied to two case studies of planar rolling nonprehensile manipulation, namely, the ball-and-beam and the eccentric disk-on-disk. The performance of the resulting controllers is illustrated through both simulations and experimental results, showing the applicability of the design in a real setup.
This article focuses on ethical issues raised by increasing levels of autonomy for surgical robots. These ethical issues are explored mainly by reference to state-ofart case studies and imminent ...advances in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) and Microsurgery. In both area, surgicalworkspace is limited and the required precision is high. For this reason, increasing levels of robotic autonomy can make a significant difference there, and ethically justified control sharing between humans and robots must be introduced. In particular, from a responsibility and accountability perspective suitable policies for theMeaningfulHuman Control (MHC) of increasingly autonomous surgical robots are proposed. It is highlighted how MHC should be modulated in accordance with various levels of autonomy for MIS and Microsurgery robots. Moreover, finer MHC distinctions are introduced to deal with contextual conditions concerning e.g. soft or rigid anatomical environments.
In this paper, the postural synergy configuration subspace given by the fundamental eigengrasps of the UB Hand IV is derived from experiments, and a simplified synergy-based strategy for planning ...grasps is proposed. The objectives of this work are, on one side, the simplification of grasp synthesis in a configuration space of reduced dimensions and, on the other side, the attainment of a human-like behavior for anthropomorphic hands. A reference set of 36 hand postures, chosen with the goal of covering the entire grasp variety referring to a recently proposed taxonomy, has been considered for the evaluation of the hand synergies. With the aim of defining general properties of the three predominant synergies, the reference set of hand postures has been applied to other two anthropomorphic robot hands, and the obtained synergies have been compared with the ones computed considering the UB Hand IV kinematics. Moreover, the synthesis of new grasps, not contained in the reference set of hand postures, has also been achieved by means of the synergy subspace. The experiments carried out demonstrate that the adopted synergy-based planning method works efficiently for all the considered grasps even if not contained in the reference set used for the evaluation of the postural synergies.
•A method to derive the three predominant synergies of the UB Hand IV is proposed.•The control strategy exploiting synergies for reach to grasp action is described.•Synthesis of new grasps not in the set used for synergies evaluation is achieved.•The method for synergies derivation is applied to other two robot hands.•The obtained synergies for different hands kinematics have been compared.
The paper proposes a novel framework for registering and segmenting 3D point clouds of large-scale natural terrain and complex environments coming from a multisensor heterogeneous robotics system, ...consisting of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles. This framework involves data acquisition and pre-processing, 3D heterogeneous registration and integrated multi-sensor based segmentation modules. The first module provides robust and accurate homogeneous registrations of 3D environmental models based on sensors’ measurements acquired from the ground (UGV) and aerial (UAV) robots. For 3D UGV registration, we proposed a novel local minima escape ICP (LME-ICP) method, which is based on the well known iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm extending it by the introduction of our local minima estimation and local minima escape mechanisms. It did not require any prior known pose estimation information acquired from sensing systems like odometry, global positioning system (GPS), or inertial measurement units (IMU). The 3D UAV registration has been performed using the Structure from Motion (SfM) approach. In order to improve and speed up the process of outliers removal for large-scale outdoor environments, we introduced the Fast Cluster Statistical Outlier Removal (FCSOR) method. This method was used to filter out the noise and to downsample the input data, which will spare computational and memory resources for further processing steps. Then, we co-registered a point cloud acquired from a laser ranger (UGV) and a point cloud generated from images (UAV) generated by the SfM method. The 3D heterogeneous module consists of a semi-automated 3D scan registration system, developed with the aim to overcome the shortcomings of the existing fully automated 3D registration approaches. This semi-automated registration system is based on the novel Scale Invariant Registration Method (SIRM). The SIRM provides the initial scaling between two heterogenous point clouds and provides an adaptive mechanism for tuning the mean scale, based on the difference between two consecutive estimated point clouds’ alignment error values. Once aligned, the resulting homogeneous ground-aerial point cloud is further processed by a segmentation module. For this purpose, we have proposed a system for integrated multi-sensor based segmentation of 3D point clouds. This system followed a two steps sequence: ground-object segmentation and color-based region-growing segmentation. The experimental validation of the proposed 3D heterogeneous registration and integrated segmentation framework was performed on large-scale datasets representing unstructured outdoor environments, demonstrating the potential and benefits of the proposed semi-automated 3D registration system in real-world environments.
On November 19, 2018, 30 years after establishment, the updated Brazilian National Air Quality Standards (NAQS) were published. These NAQS were formulated as a fundamental part and instrument of the ...National Program for the Control of Air Quality and considering, as a reference, the World Health Organization Air Quality Guidelines, published in 2005. An important contribution is the inclusion of PM2.5 (particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 µm) as a criteria pollutant and a more restrictive target limit for PM10 (particles that have aerodynamic diameters less than or equal to 10 µm). In this work, the NAQS were discussed using, as a case study, data collected during the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The lack of PM2.5 data for Brazilian cities results in the calculation of a lower air quality index (AQI), leading to ostensibly good air quality. The results presented in this study clearly support the requirement of improvement of the new resolution since, in the present form, it does not meet the main goal of protecting public health.