Uncertainty Estimation in Vision-Aided Robot Teleoperation System

Teleoperation allows the use of human intelligence and decision making in remote tasks which are too dangerous for humans to perform. Technologies such as force feedback and haptic guidance have shown to increase task efficiency during teleoperation. In an unmodeled environment, sensors provide input for haptic guidance or present extra...

Expressive Protection Covers for Lightweight Robot Arms

This graduation report describes the research and development of a novel product, a weatherproof fabric based robot protection cover augmented with flexible LED displays. The product has a built-in power and data distribution system and is capable of being mounted onto an existing lightweight robot arm (LWA). The project was done with the...

Teleoperation Support System Robust to Uncertainties in Haptic Guidance

When tasks need to be performed in remote, potentially inaccessible and/or hostile environments for humans, it is often more convenient to send a robot. Such environments are often only partially known, and therefore not suitable for fully autonomous robots to operate in. In these situations teleoperation can be used, which combines the problem...

Autonomous Navigation with Obstacle Avoidance of a Nonholonomic Four Wheel Steering Robotic Platform

INTERACT is a space technology demonstration experiment in which an advanced wheeled mobile robot (WMR) will be tele-operated from space. The experiment consists of a navigation phase and a manipulation phase. To cope with adverse communication conditions and limited means for control, an autonomous navigation algorithm needs to be developed for...

Upper Body Orthotics for Wearable Haptic Robots

The following thesis reports the graduation project done at the ESA Telerobotics & Haptics Lab by the Industrial Design Engineering student Emiel den Exter. The assignment was to design a set of upper body orthoses for astronauts, which are used to attach force-reflecting arm-exoskeletons to the human body. Exoskeletons are lightweight robotics...

Cogging compensation in embedded brushless motor control for haptics applications

For the development of a space qualified, 7 degrees of freedom, haptic arm exoskeleton a brushless DC motor with high torque production, power density and efficiency was selected. However, the attraction of the rotor magnets to the stator teeth introduces an additive, position dependent, torque disturbance on the motor shaft called cogging...

The Development of an Efficient Grasp Master for Space Robotics Teleoperation

This thesis reports on the development of an efficient grasp master for space robotics teleoperation that will complement the haptic human arm master X-Arm-2 (Schiele 2011). It should provide the hand and fingers of various operators with sensing and feedback functions, enabling bilateral teleoperation of various types of robotic end-effectors...