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The root locus is one of the major topics covered in an undergraduate-level automatic control course. It usually involves a nontrivial number of constructing steps, which on many occasions is hard for students to follow. Here, a short summary lecture taught after the normal root locus lecture is proposed. This method treats the root locus as a variation of the one or multi coefficients of the polynomials, and it categorizes various root locus plots into groups by utilizing complementary root loci and analytic or breakaway analysis. Through the combined lecture, the student learning process can be executed more smoothly and effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a new coordination manipulation strategy for a custom-made dual-arm robot. With master and slave coordination infrastructure, both spatial relation and sense of touch are considered to hold an object stably. Given the known trajectory of the master arm, the slave arm fuses position and force commands by using the Kalman filter to yield optimal compensation amounts. The proposed strategy has been experimentally evaluated, and the results confirm that it was capable of dealing with fragile and flexible objects. In addition, the influence of the loop time of the digital controller on force control for this task was also investigated in mathematical and simulated ways. Furthermore, a series of experiments were designed to explore the effects that have influences on errors in force control. The main factors that affect force control error were analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the inspiration for, design, analysis, and implementation of, and experimentation with the first dynamical vertical climbing robot. Biologists have proposed a pendulous climbing model that abstracts remarkable similarities in dynamical wall scaling behavior exhibited by radically different animal species. We numerically study a version of that pendulous climbing template dynamically scaled for applicability to utilitarian payloads with conventional electronics and actuation. This simulation study reveals that the incorporation of passive compliance can compensate for the scaled model’s poorer power density and scale disadvantages relative to biology. However, the introduction of additional dynamical elements raises new concerns about stability regarding both the power stroke and limb coordination schemes that we allay via mathematical analysis of further simplified models. Combining these numerical and analytical insights into a series of design prototypes, we document the correspondence of the various models to the scaled platforms and report that our final prototype climbs dynamically at vertical speeds up to 0.67 m/s (1.5 body-lengths per second, in rough agreement with our models’ predictions). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]