Improving rowing performance by adjusting oar blade size and angle

The principal aim of the work presented here is to investigate and demonstrate that a forward tilted rowing blade would result in a more efficient and effective motion of the blade through the water that would result in a higher boat speed when an equal input power is provided. A 1:5 scaled rowing boat is used to determine the performance of...

A Secure Robot Learning Framework for Cyber Attack Scheduling and Countermeasure

The problem of learning-based control for robots has been extensively studied, whereas the security issue under malicious adversaries has not been paid much attention to. Malicious adversaries can invade intelligent devices and communication networks used in robots, causing incidents, achieving illegal objectives, and even injuring people....

Non-Assembly Walking Mechanism Utilizing a Hexapod Gait

Small inspection robots allow for the optimal exploration of environments and the collection of data from challenging areas, particularly where there may be small access points or tight and fragile surroundings. These robots can be custom-built for specific tasks, but the design and assembly process for this can be costly, both in resources and...

Hiding Assistive Robots During Training in Immersive VR Does Not Affect Users’ Motivation, Presence, Embodiment, Performance, Nor Visual Attention

Combining immersive virtual reality (VR) using head-mounted displays (HMDs) with assisting robotic devices might be a promising procedure to enhance neurorehabilitation. However, it is still an open question how immersive virtual environments (VE) should be designed when interacting with rehabilitation robots. In conventional training, the...

Fast grasping of unknown objects using cylinder searching on a single point cloud

Grasping of unknown objects with neither appearance data nor object models given in advance is very important for robots that work in an unfamiliar environment. The goal of this paper is to quickly synthesize an executable grasp for one unknown object by using cylinder searching on a single point cloud. Specifically, a 3D camera is first used to...

Design and Development of a Physical and a Virtual Embodied Conversational Agent for Social Support of Older Adults

Populations in developed societies show an increasingly higher life expectancy across the globe. To support older adults to live longer and healthier lives in the familiar surroundings of their homes, technological developments, such as robots and avatars, have a great potential. To investigate long-term interactions between older adults and a ...

Human-Agent Experience Sharing: Creating Social Agents for Elderly People with Dementia

As intelligent technology steadily becomes a part of modern societies, people collaborate with agents more frequently, and so agents need to be socially intelligent, i.e. personalised and context-sensitive. This paper introduces a context-sen-sitive personalisation framework for social agents that fa-<br/>cilitates the establishment of human...

Object grasping by combining caging and force closure

The current research trends of object grasping can be summarized as caging grasping and force closure grasping. The motivation of this paper is to combine the advantage of caging grasping and force closure grasping to enable under-actuated grippers like the Lacquey gripper and the parallel grippers like the PR2 gripper to quickly grasp the...

Unknown object grasping by using concavity

Reducing the grasp candidates for unknown object grasping while maintaining grasp stability is the goal of this paper. In this paper, we propose an efficient and straight forward unknown object grasping method by using concavities of the unknown objects to significantly reduce the grasp candidates. Shortest path concavity is first employed to...

Robotic Bipedal Running: Increasing disturbance rejection

The goal of the research presented in this thesis is to increase the understanding of the human running gait. The understanding of the human running gait is essential for the development of devices, such as prostheses and orthoses, that enable disabled people to run or that enable able people to increase their running performance. Although these...

Foot placement in robotic bipedal locomotion

Human walking is remarkably robust, versatile and energy-efficient: humans have the ability to handle large unexpected disturbances, perform a wide variety of gaits and consume little energy. A bipedal walking robot that performs well on all of these aspects has not yet been developed. Some robots are versatile, others are energy-efficient, and...

Failure Detection, Isolation and Recovery system concept for the European Robotic Arm

Currently Fokker Space B.V. is developing the European Robotic Arm (ERA) under contract of the European Space Agency (ESA). ERA's main mission is the assembly and servicing of the Russian Segment of the International Space Station Alpha. The purpose of this paper is to describe how the safety requirements, given the specific possibilities and...

Robotisering, automatisering en mechanisering in de scheepsbouw