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Due to the ever-increasing demand for food commodities and issues arising in their transport from rural to urban areas, commercial agricultural practices with the help of vertical farming are being taken up near urban regions. For the realization of agricultural practices on high-rise vertical farms, where human intervention is quite laborious, robotic assistance would be an effective solution to perform agricultural processes like seeding, transplanting, harvesting, health monitoring, nutrient-water supply, etc. The requirements and complexities of these tasks to be performed are different such as end-effector requirement, payload capacity required, amount of clutter while performing the task, etc. In such cases, an individual robotic configuration would not serve all the purposes and each task may require a different configuration. Purchasing a large number of configurations, as per requirement, is not economical and will also increase the cost of maintenance. Thus, the design of a reconfigurable robot manipulator is proposed in this work which can cater to modular layouts. A thorough study of the processes involved in the farming of leafy vegetables is done and the tasks to be performed by the manipulator are identified. Constrained optimization is performed based on reachability, while minimizing DoF, for the tasks of transplanting, plant heath monitoring, and harvesting to find the optimal configurations which can perform the given tasks. The study resulted in 5-DoF, 4-DoF, and 6-DoF configurations for transplanting, plant heath monitoring, and harvesting, respectively, thus emphasizing the need of a reconfigurable solution. The configurations are realized using modular library and verified to satisfy reachability to provide a complete solution.

Designing an urban reconnaissance robot is highly challenging work given the nature of the terrain in which these robots are required to operate. In this work, we attempt to extend the locomotion capabilities of these robots beyond what is currently feasible. The design and unique features of our bio-inspired reconfigurable robot, called Scorpio, with rolling, crawling, and wall-climbing locomotion abilities are presented in this paper. The design of the Scorpio platform is inspired by Cebrennus rechenbergi, a rare spider species that has rolling, crawling and wall-climbing locomotion attributes. This work also presents the kinematic and dynamic model of Scorpio. The mechanical design and system architecture are introduced in detail, followed by a detailed description on the locomotion modes. The conducted experiments validated the proposed approach and the ability of the Scorpio platform to synthesise crawling, rolling and wall-climbing behaviours. Future work is envisioned for using these robots as active, unattended, mobile ground sensors in urban reconnaissance missions. The accompanying video demonstrates the shape shifting locomotion capabilities of the Scorpio robot.

A welding path can be planned effectively for spot welding robots using the ant colony algorithm, but the initial parameters of the ant colony algorithm are usually selected through human experience, resulting in an unreasonable planned path. This paper combines the ant colony algorithm with the particle swarm algorithm and uses the particle swarm algorithm to train the initial parameters of the ant colony algorithm to plan an optimal path. Firstly, a mathematical model for spot welding path planning is established using the ant colony algorithm. Then, the particle swarm algorithm is introduced into the ant colony algorithm to find the optimal combination of parameters by treating the initial parameters $\\alpha$ and $\\beta$ of the ant colony algorithm and as two-dimensional coordinates in the particle swarm algorithm. Finally, the simulation analysis was carried out using MATLAB to obtain the paths of the improved ant colony algorithm for six different sets of parameters with an average path length of 10,357.7509 mm, but the average path length obtained by conventional algorithm was 10,830.8394 mm. Convergence analysis of the improved ant colony algorithm showed that the average number of iterations was 17. Therefore, the improved ant colony algorithm has higher solution quality and converges faster.

Soft magnetic robots have attracted tremendous interest owning to their controllability and manoeuvrability, demonstrating great prospects in a number of industrial areas. However, further explorations on the locomotion and corresponding deformation of magnetic robots with complex configurations are still challenging. In the present study, we analyse a series of soft magnetic robots with various geometric shapes under the action of the magnetic field. First, we prepared the matrix material for the robot, that is, the mixture of silicone and magnetic particles. Next, we fabricated a triangular robot whose locomotion speed and warping speed are approximately 1.5 and 9 mm/s, respectively. We then surveyed the generalised types of robots with other shapes, where the movement, grabbing, closure and flipping behaviours were fully demonstrated. The experiments show that the arching speed and grabbing speed of the cross-shaped robot are around 4.8 and 3.5 mm/s, the crawling speed of the pentagram-shaped robot is 3.5 mm/s, the pentahedron-shaped robot can finish its closure motion in 1 s and the arch-shaped robot can flip forward and backward in 0.5 s. The numerical simulation based on the finite element method has been compared with the experimental results, and they are in excellent agreement. The results are beneficial to engineer soft robots under the multi-fields, which can broaden the eyes on inventing intellectual devices and equipment.

Flexible cables in cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) are easy to be excited and vibrate. Cable vibration will react on the end-effector, causing attitude deviation of the end-effector. The main objective of this study is to accurately model axially moving flexible cables and characterize the dynamic behaviors of associated compliant CDPRs. Firstly, a model for transverse vibration of the axially moving length-variable cable is developed. On this basis, an original nonlinear dynamic model of the CDPRs able to capture the vibration of the cables and the dynamics of the end-effector is proposed. Secondly, the frequency–amplitude relationship of the CDPR is obtained. Moreover, the significance of the excitation effect caused by the axially moving length-variable cables is demonstrated, by comparing the results with and without excitation effect at different frequencies. It turns out that, as the oscillation frequency of the end-effector increases, the end-effector and cables exhibit the dynamics process from steady state to unstable large-amplitude vibration and finally to stable small-amplitude vibration. This indicates that the dynamics of the CDPR exhibit non-linear characteristics, due to the influence of flexible cables. Finally, the proposed dynamic model of compliant CDPRs is validated by experiments performed in the laboratory.

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has shown tremendous advances over the traditional technique. A crucial challenge for developing a MIS robot is the kinematic design of the remote center-of-motion (RCM) mechanism. In this paper, a class of spatial RCM mechanism is analyzed. They are obtained by generating virtual parallelograms. The main process is to construct a line that passes through a fixed point under the mechanical constraint. The axis of the surgical tool is then constrained to parallel with that line. Hence, due to the geometrical feature of the parallel lines, the axis of the surgical tool will always pass through a fixed point, i.e., the RCM point. Due to the specially designed structure, the fixed point does not need to be physically belonging to the mechanism. The geometrical analysis method is employed to obtain the closed-form solution of the forward kinematics of the proposed mechanisms. Due to the high load capacity of parallel mechanism, the robots based on the proposed RCM mechanisms have promising applications as an external positioner to be used in robotic single-port surgeries.

A method is presented for configuration selection to obtain the best tip-over stability of a modular reconfigurable mobile manipulator (MRMM) under various application situations. The said MRMM consists of a modular reconfigurable robot (MRR) mounted on a mobile platform. The MRR in different configurations creates different wrenches onto the mobile platform, leading to different tip-over moments of the MRMM, even though the joint speeds or tip speeds remain the same. The underlying problem pertains to selecting one configuration of MRR for reconfiguration that would obtain the best tip-over stability under a given application. First, all the permissible configurations are identified through an enumeration method. Then, the feasible configurations are determined based on application-oriented workspace classifications. At last, two workspace indices, vertical reach and horizontal reach, are used to select an optimal configuration. The tip-over stability analysis and evaluation of MRMM are carried out for verification for three cases including vertical, horizontal, and general 3D space applications. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) possess fast-moving abilities and have been used in various tasks in the past decades. However, their performances are still restricted by insufficient endurance and confined environments. Intuitively, combining other locomotion modes with UAVs, such as diving and driving, would be an appropriate idea to improve the robot’s adaptability and solve the endurance problem. Recently, the terrestrial/aerial hybrid robots have drawn the researchers’ eyes for their outstanding performances, which can deploy flight mode to traverse insurmountable terrains and ground mode to increase endurance and realize detailed searches. Therefore, this paper developed the autonomous quadrotor tilting hybrid robot (AQT-HR) to achieve terrestrial/aerial dual-modal mobility and verified that the robot delivers high energy efficiency. The AQT-HR can achieve flying and driving through a quadrotor tilting mechanism, which can alter one single driving force into different directions. Furthermore, the dynamic models of the hybrid robot’s aerial and ground locomotion are derived and introduced into the model-feedforward PID control algorithm for improving the robot’s flying stability. Finally, we conducted some mobility tests and experiments about traversing obstacles to demonstrate that the proposed hybrid robot can realize autonomous mode switching and perform a low energy consumption in ground movement mode.

Gripper is one of the most important parts of robot because of contacting with workpieces directly and has attracted lots of research interests. However, the existing grippers are either simple in function or complex in structure. In this paper, we will propose a one-DOF gripper based on a compliant mechanism with four identical twofold-symmetric Bricard linkages. A mobile network with four identical twofold-symmetric Bricard linkages with particular design parameters is constructed at first. Kinematics, such as mobility, singularity, and folding performance, is then analyzed to show the potential of realizing the function of grasping. The result is demonstrated with a physical prototype. To simplify the fabricating process, a compliant mechanism of the network is designed and fabricated with a single polypropylene board, and the grasping function is realized by a cable-driven scheme. Some grasping experiments are carried out on different types of objects which shows that the proposed and fabricated four-figure gripper is simple in structure and has a great grasping function. The work provides a new idea for the design of grippers with low cost, simple structure, and rich functions.