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Robotic manipulators require contact force sensing capabilities to sense the contact force between the manipulator and an object. Specifically, for humans and robots to coexist in the work environment, the robot must be able to detect an external force applied by a human. This study presents a new intrinsic force sensing method for robot manipulators that can obtain accurate information of the external force applied by a human during human–robot interaction. The method employs a robot cover, which is typically utilized in robot manipulators. Unlike conventional force sensing methods, a six-axis force/torque sensor is placed between the cover and the link of the robot manipulator. As a result, the proposed method provides information of the three-axis contact force applied to the cover surface and its contact location. Therefore, the cover itself becomes a sensorized cover based on the intrinsic force sensing method. To evaluate its sensing performance, the sensorized cover is experimentally validated using reference sensors. Finally, an experiment is performed in which the robot successfully recognizes letters written on the cover, indicating a high level of contact force sensing performance.

In this paper, we propose a robust method for estimating the parameters of robot manipulators using the torque separation technique, which was developed previously by the authors, to extract the inertial, gravitational, and frictional components from the input torques of multiple sinusoidal joint motions. The separated components of the input torque produce a set of reduced linear regression equations where the dynamic parameters of the robot manipulators appear decoupled or minimally coupled. A mathematical analysis is presented to show that the set of reduced regression equations tends to yield more robust parameter estimation than the conventional way where a large dimensional full regression equation is solved simultaneously. An iterative scheme to alleviate the possibility of parameter estimation error caused by the deviation from the assumed ideal sinusoidal motions is also proposed. Experimentation with two robot manipulators is used to verify the proposed approach and related claims. The proposed method is simple and pragmatic without requiring any specialized signal filtering and technical know-hows which numerous previous methods often demanded for explicitly or implicitly.

The industrial dual-arm robot is being developed. The developed industrial dual-arm robot aim to work with human workers or to work instead of human workers. Redundancy by high degree of freedom caused by arm and waist make robot movement difficult in the narrow space for human workers. Robot arms would take unexpected posture without proper redundant control method. In particular elbows can cause hazard situation by colliding with the environment or body of robot. Here novel method to control robot elbows is introduced. It shows good performance without loss of the position precision of end-effectors. Also it does not require high computing power, which make it useful for practical robot control. The proposed method is confirmed by the simulation.

Production automation by human-robot collaboration has drawn significant attention due to increasing demands for automation in the manufacturing process of small electronic products, which were previously manufactured manually. Accordingly, the research for human-robot collaboration is being actively conducted and intuitive teaching is an essential technology to realize easy and efficient teaching of a collaborative robot. This paper proposes an intuitive teaching tool attached to a robot end effector that can accurately teach motions to a robot manipulator, without being affected by sensor noises. This device consists of three parts: a motion operation part for teaching six degrees of freedom motion of the robot, a motion setting part which consists of core functions necessary for teaching and a status display part for displaying the status of the teaching device and the robot. It is designed to perform teaching work by a combination of twelve switches which have one-to-one mapping relation to each degree of freedom of motion. A prototype has been implemented to verify the performance and has been applied to an experiment of six degrees of freedom motion teaching with UR5 robot.

The demands placed on automation of cell production processes for IT products are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Dual-arm robots are drawing particular attention as a process solution because they offer flexibility and can work in a similar manner to a human operator. In this paper, we propose an automation system for cellular phone packing processes that uses two dual-arm robots. The applied robots are designed with specifications that meet the requirements of the cellular phone packing tasks. In addition, a robotic cell production system is proposed that applies a task allocation method to perform an efficient packing job for cellular phones. In particular, each task is assigned with the intention of reducing the takt time , which is the time taken to finish a single product in the production line and to avoid collisions between the two robots. Finally, we implement some of our results in a demonstration of a packing job that involves filling five unit boxes with seven kinds of accessories.

Industrial robots have been used in the various manufacturing processes such as part handling, palletizing, welding, assembly, processing and so on. Automatic assembly with robotic systems becomes more important to increase the rate of assembly automation in the industrial field. However, assembly task is generally automated only for uncomplicated workpieces which have the simple shape and high tolerance. Although there are currently some kinds of automatic assembly technologies including the visual feedback, the active control algorithms and the passive compliance mechanism, these methods are insufficient for the easy application and the stability. In the paper, a new concept of the passive compliant device with the displacement measurement system and the robotic assembly strategy are proposed to increase the performance of the robotic assembly system.

This paper proposes a design methodology of self-reconfigurable kinematics and control scheme for modular and reconfigurable robots. A modular manipulator has been proposed to meet the requirement of task adaptation in versatile needs for service and industrial robot area. For self-reconfiguration of designed modular manipulators, kinematic and dynamic contexts are extracted from supplied modules and assembly information and related codes are automatically generated including controller. Thus a user can easily build and use a modular robot without professional knowledge for needed tasks. Simulation results are presented to verify the validity of the proposed method.

The industrial dual-arm robot is being developed. The developed industrial dual-arm robot aim to work with human workers or to work instead of human workers. Redundancy by high degree of freedom caused by arm and waist make robot movement difficult in the narrow space for human workers. Robot arms would take unexpected posture without proper redundant control method. In particular elbows can cause hazard situation by colliding with the environment or body of robot. Here novel method to control robot elbows is introduced. It shows good performance without loss of the position precision of end-effectors. Also it does not require high computing power, which make it useful for practical robot control. The proposed method is confirmed by the simulation.

Robot arms are being increasingly used in various fields with special attention given to unmanned systems. In this research we developed a high payload dual arm robot, in which the forearm module is modifiable depending on the assigned task, such as object handling or lifting humans in a rescue operation. With each forearm module specialized for an assigned task (e.g. safety for rescue and redundant joints for object handling task), the robot can conduct various tasks more effectively than could be done previously.

The dual-arm robot can work instead of human workers. The new dual-arm robot for manufacturing IT products such as mobile phone and TV were developed. Here two real cases with the developed dual-arm robot are introduced. One case is cosmetic packaging and the other case is IT part packaging.

Needs for human-robot collaboration in production automation are increasing and thus the technology for human-robot collaboration is being actively developed. User-friendly teaching tool of a robot manipulator is one of essential technologies for efficient human-robot collaboration. This paper proposes an intuitive teaching tool that can be attached to the robot and can accurately teach motions without being affected by sensor noise. This device is designed to perform teaching work by a combination of a jog dial and buttons. A prototype was implemented to verify the proposed concept.

Some companies have begun to sell robot modules for customers to build their own robots. However, software technology has not caught up to hardware performance. A novel software to create a kinematics library for module-based robots is introduced.

These days, the interests on the high speed handling robots are increasing because it is important to get down the unit cost of production to get the price competitiveness. The parallel kinematic mechanism is more suitable to implement the high speed robot system as well known. The moving parts of the high speed parallel robot have to be designed for light weight. But the vibration motion is induced by the light weight links because they drive in high acceleration and deceleration. In this reason, the structural analysis of the high speed parallel kinematic robot is very important in the design process. In this paper, the study on the structural analysis of a high speed parallel robot has been done and the research results will be introduced.

Recently, the requirement of automation in the cell production system is increasing due to a decrease of skilled workers who are the key point of a cell production system. This paper proposes a dual-arm robot designed and implemented with consideration of being applied to a cell production line of cellular phone. A specification was derived from the analysis of production process and the consideration of configuration for human-robot cooperation. Design and implementation results of the proposed dual-arm robot were suggested and the feasibility was verified through the demonstration of the proposed robot in some of packaging job of cellular phone.

Module based robot has long history. There are many module based robot in the market. Some companies sell those to be used in industrial application. However software technology is not doing catch up hardware performance. Company provide software tool-set, and user can build their own control system. Customers meet the limitation when they want to build kinematics library to control their robots in Cartesian space. It is clear that expertise in robotics is required to develop kinematics. In this article the novel software architecture to make kinematic library for module based robot automatically is introduced.

This paper proposed the simulation environment and model for modular and reconfigurable manipulator to develop and verify a control algorithm for a user-designed robot. In the proposed simulation environment, a user can select needed modules and compose module blocks into the desired modular manipulator. After constructing robots, codes for kinematics and controller are automatically generated and simulation can be easily conducted for the constructed robot based on generated codes.

In this article an example of art performance with robot is introduced. It was real collaboration among robot researchers and artist. Artist designed the performance. Robot researchers collaborated with artist by providing robotic constraints and configuring robot motion.

Direct teaching of the industrial robot is a novel technique to easily teach manipulators. However, teaching data by human hand cannot help having large noise errors ranging from low to high frequency. To use teaching data, post-processing to correct the teaching trajectory is required. Here, a novel shape-based trajectory correction method to rebuild teaching data with the feature information of curvature and velocity is proposed. The proposed method is tested on square and circular objects.

The safety of humans who work with robots is an important issue. Many studies have addressed related methods, but fundamental limits to meet safety requirements have been encountered owing to the absence of compliance in robot actuators. Pneumatic muscle is considered to be a basic actuator and offers the advantage of intrinsic elasticity to achieve joint compliance. In this study, joint compliance actuated by pneumatic muscle is actively utilized to enhance human safety during collisions. To this end, the authors present a novel approach to control compliance and associated positions independently with no cross-performance effects using pneumatic muscles. The proposed method is verified by simulation and experiments using a physical robot.

The ability to live without the help of a caretaker enhances the quality of life of those who are bed-ridden or confined to a wheel-chair. A lot of systems have been proposed to support the daily life of bed-ridden. A smart home, especially a bed-type robot system, can help the movement and action of patients. This paper discusses the development of an intelligent bed robot system (IBRS), which can help the elderly and the disabled have independent life in bed. The IBRS is a special bed equipped with two robot arms and an array of pressure sensors attached to the mattress. The pressure distribution on the mattress is used to estimate the pose of the patient, and an appropriate assistance is provided by the robot arms. The proposed system has been tested experimentally for its effectiveness while maximizing the therapeutic outcome.

There is an increasing need for manufacturing systems to produce batches in small quantities. Such manufacturing systems are significantly difficult to develop with conventional automation equipment. Recently, several research groups have applied industrial dual-arm robots to cell production lines. A synchronisation method for robots is necessary for the cell production process when robots work in a shared workspace. Conventional automation factories do not need this method because the main control system operates all machines or robots. However, the intended application for the developed robot is in small manufacturing environments which cannot install an expensive main control system. An inexpensive and high-performance method with a simple digital in/out channel using EtherCAT is proposed. The developed method was validated for practical use on a cell production line.

For dual-arm robot systems, which continue to become more common in the field of industrial robotics, a redundant shoulder complex could be very important to new developments. However, constructing a kinematically redundant shoulder complex is difficult because of spatial constraints. A novel redundant shoulder complex for a human-like robot that is driven by flexible wire tendons against spatial constraints is proposed. The kinematically redundant shoulder complex allows the human-like robot to generate more natural motions because of the availability of redundant degrees of freedom (DOFs), i.e. six DOFs per side. To control the proposed shoulder complex, a hybrid control scheme is used; the positioning precision was considered, and the ability of the shoulder complex to perform several human-like motions was verified.

Safety of humans who work with robots is an important issue. Many studies have addressed related methods, but fundamental limits to meet safety requirements have been encountered owing to the absence of compliance in robot actuators. Pneumatic muscle (PM) is considered to be a basic actuator and offers the advantage of intrinsic elasticity to achieve joint compliance. In this paper, joint compliance actuated by PM is actively utilized to enhance human safety during collisions. To this end, the authors present a novel approach to control compliance and associated positions independently with no cross-performance effects using PMs. The proposed method is verified by experiments using a physical robot. In addition, methods to decrease damage from collisions between robots and humans due to operational faults are evaluated through experiments. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by measuring the impact impulse in collisions.

In order to obtain a good result in the laser welding process, the laser welding technology for manufacturing an automobile body is studied in this research. The robot, the seam tracking system, and CW Nd:YAG laser are used for the laser welding robot system. Especially, the development of the laser-stripe sensor is highlighted. The laser-stripe sensor can measure the profile of the welding object and obtain the gap and seam line. Moreover, the working distance of the sensor can be varied. The control scheme of the whole system is also presented. The profile and gap measurement and the seam tracking experiments were carried out to validate the operation of the system.

The demands for an automation in a cell production process of IT products are becoming increasingly sophisticated. In particular, a dual-arm robot draws an attention as a solution because it has a flexibility and it can work in a similar way with a human. In this paper, we propose the automated robotic cell production system for cellular phone packing processes using two dual-arm robots. To achieve a goal, a method of task allocation for efficient packing job of cellular phone is proposed. Finally, we implement some results which show the packing job of 5 unit box with 7 kinds of accessories.

Requirement for automation in the cell production system is lately increasing due to a decrease of skilled human workers. Thus dual-arm robots draw an attention for alternatives. This paper proposes a robotic cell production system with two dual-arm robots which are designed and implemented with consideration of being applied to a cell production line of cellular phone.

Delta robot mechanism is very useful for the purpose of high speed movement, so that is why the many commercial robot makers choose it for the high speed robot manipulator. For the high speed robot, it is very important to study on the dynamical behavior. In this paper the study results on the vibrational motion of the high speed parallel robot are introduced.

Currently, there are no cases of the bolting with robot. The industrial dual-arm robot is being developed to be used for bolting process in the assembly line. The dual-arm robot has advantages in the workspace compared to footprints. For example, assembly of big panel of LCD/LED/PDP demands small footprint and large workspace that is similar to human's one. We implemented bolting process with the developed robot and the feasibility is checked.

All of industrial robots need the fixed-time control property commonly. The EtherCAT is a highly flexible network protocol that is developing at a rapid rate. It is extention of conventional ethernet with a high speed communication and simple wiring characteristic. With the ethercat, the implementation of the industrial robot is more easier. Here, the implementation of the industrial robot with the function of the direct teaching is described.

Recently, the requirement of an automation in the cell production system is increasing due to a decrease of a skilled workers who are the key point of a cell production system. Thus a dual-arm robot draws an attention for an alternative. This paper presents a design scheme of a dual-arm robot and controller structure for an application to industrial cell production spot. A design concept and a prototype robot are suggested.

The industrial robot is widly used in the field of car manufacturing, welding, wafer handling, object transfering and so on. Each application needs its own important properties such as high precision, high payload, compact size and so on. Then, all of industrial robots need the fixed-time control property commonly. The ethercat is a highly flexible EtherCAT network protocol that is developing at a rapid rate and growing at an even faster clip. It is extention of conventional ethernet with a high speed communication and simple wiring characteristic. With the ethercat, the implementation of the industrial robot is more easier. Here, the implementation of the industrial robot with the function of the direct teaching is described. That robot is controlled through the ethercat communication between the ethercat master in PC and ethercat slaves developed for this robot.

Human rights at poor working condition is the severe problem in modern manufacturing system. The industrial dual-arm robot is being developed to meet these social issues fundamentally. The software platform for the industrial dual-arm robot is also being developed, which have many differences compared to the conventional robot software platforms. The software platform for the industrial dual-arm robot which are being developed should have the realtime control capability, the precise motion command interface and the convenience of usage. A special architecture for the mentioned functions is introduced. The proposed architecture consists of the multiple user command input tools, the translator for the unique robot language and the robot control framework with the realtime control property controlled by the unique robot language.

Parallel robot has been usually used for pick-and place motion in very high speed and high precision environment to enhance the productivity. The high speed parallel robot is proposed for handling the solar cell in this paper. However the target processes are not just limited to the solar cell. The control algorithm is developed to achieve the high-speed tracking control of pick-and-place motion. Also the prototype machine is designed and the cycle time and the repeatability of the proposed robot are suggested. The method using the feedback and feedforward control is applied to the developed parallel robot and the performance is verified through the experiments. To improve the performance, both the tracking error and synchronization error are considered.

Human-Robot hybrid manufacturing system means a new type of manufacturing system that the human and the robot working together besides each other to enhance the productivity of the factory. In this kind of new manufacturing system, the robot has to meet new kind of requirements. For this reason, the authors designed a new type of dual arm robot system and the research results will be introduced in this paper.

Human rights at poor working condition is the severe problem in modern manufacturing system. The industrial dual-arm robot is being developed to meet these social issues fundamentally. The industrial dual-arm robot can assemble the complex product in such way human do. We arm developing the dual-arm robot which has the function of assembly of IT products such as the mobile phone and LCD/LED panel. Currently, we are building up the simulator environments for that physical robot. In the simulator environments, the production line environments beside the dual-arm robot are built up to test the feasibility of the work process.

The safety of humans who work with robots is an important issue. Many studies have addressed related methods, but fundamental limits to meet safety requirements have been encountered owing to the absence of compliance in robot actuators. Pneumatic muscle is considered to be a basic actuator and offers the advantage of intrinsic elasticity to achieve joint compliance. In this study, joint compliance actuated by pneumatic muscle is actively utilized to enhance human safety during collisions. To this end, the authors present a novel approach to control compliance and associated positions independently with no cross-performance effects using pneumatic muscles. The proposed method is verified by simulation and experiments using a physical robot.

The safety of humans working with robots is an important issue. Many studies have addressed related methods, but fundamental limits to meet required safety have been met owing to the absence of compliance in the robot actuators. Pneumatic muscle is considered to be a basic actuator and offers the advantage of intrinsic elasticity to achieve the joint compliance. Here, the joint compliance actuated by pneumatic muscle is actively utilized to enhance human safety during collisions. To this end, the authors present a novel approach to control compliance and position independently without affecting on the each other's performance using pneumatic muscles. The presented method is verified by experiments using a physical robot.

The safety of humans working with robots is an important issue. Many studies have addressed related methods, but fundamental limits to meet required safety have been met owing to the absence of compliance in the robot actuators. Pneumatic muscle is considered to be a basic actuator and offers the advantage of intrinsic elasticity to achieve the joint compliance. Here, the joint compliance actuated by pneumatic muscle is actively utilized to enhance human safety during collisions. To this end, the authors present a novel approach to control compliance and position independently without affecting on the each other's performance using pneumatic muscles. The presented method is verified by experiments using a physical robot.

This paper introduce a state classification method for detecting falling of biped robot. The method uses a support vector machine (SVM) to classify the state. The input vector for the SVM are a magnitude of acceleration, a position of center of pressure (CoP) in x and z axis, and tilt angles of torso relative to x and z axis. The input vector is based on sensor data that is measured from accelerometer and force sensing resistor (FSR) sensor. Training of the classifier is done in off-line and the trained classifier is used to classify the state of the biped robot in on-line. The method was verified in a 3D dynamics simulator and showed it could classify falling state within 0.01 second.

It is supposed that human and robot share living area in future. That time, the most important thing is security and safety of human. Robot have not injure human at any case. There are three ways for that. The first one is to control robot completely for fear that there is no emergency, which is almost impossible and dream of all engineers. The second one is to achieve smooth body like sponge. The third one is to insure soft joint actuation of robot like. Here the third method is studied using the pneumatic muscle actuators. The comparison between motor actuator and pneumatic muscle actuator is described and the method to configure robot manipulator using pneumatic muscle is also explained. Sliding mode control is applied to control 2-link manipulator. Finally impulse from crash on obstacle is studied to show the joint stiffness modification effects. Dual arm simulator is used to assure the controllability of 2-link manipulator and the property of impulse at a sudden crash.

It is supposed that human and robot share living area in future. That time, the most important thing is security and safety of human. Robot have not injure human at any case. There are three ways for that. The first one is to control robot completely for fear that there is no emergency, which is almost impossible and dream of all engineers. The second one is to achieve smooth body like sponge. The third one is to insure soft joint actuation of robot like. Here the third method is studied using the pneumatic muscle actuators. The comparison between motor actuator and pneumatic muscle actuator is described and the method to configure robot manipulator using pneumatic muscle is also explained. Also, sliding mode control is applied to control 2-link manipulator. Finally impulse from crash on obstacle is studied to show the joint stiffness modification effects. Dual arm simulator is used to assure the controllability of 2-link manipulator and the property of impulse at a sudden crash.

An intelligent bed robot system (IBRS) is proposed to help the elderly and the disabled for their independent life in bed. The IBRS is a special bed equipped with two robot arms and an array of pressure sensors attached onto the mattress. The pressure distribution on the mattress is used to estimate the pose of the patient, and an appropriate assistance is provided by the robot arms

Pneumatic muscle has many advantages such as elasticity, high power and structural similarity to a living thing's muscle. There has been many researches to control robot actuated by pneumatic muscles, but conventional theories are hard to apply on real robot plants because of their assumptions and disregards of pneumatic muscle's physical aspects like size of pneumatic muscle and its controller. Here, the new method for saving space which is occupied by many controllers to operate robot actuated by pneumatic muscles is proposed. Actually there is easy way to control pneumatic muscle using the commercial proportional pressure regulator, but its size is not suitable to be embedded on stand alone robot. So, new method using the pressure switches of compact size and encoders is suggested. This new method is tested on a robot link with ball joints, actuated by four pneumatic muscles.

Currently, most of robots are actuated by motors. Actuation using motors necessarily requires gears to increase their power, and gear has demerit of making noise and backlash effect. Motor is not suitable for robot having elastic motion either. On the other hand, pneumatic muscle has many advantages such as elasticity, high power and structural similarity to a living thing's muscle comparing with motor, so robot actuated by pneumatic muscles was developed to achieve pneumatic muscle actuator's merits even though developing PMR (Pneumatic Muscle Robot) has many difficulties as followed. PMR's size is a little bit large because of pneumatic muscle actuator's large size, which makes it hard to apply on compact size robot. Pneumatic muscles' torque/force is still insufficient without appropriate method to increase its power to actuate robot legs, though its torque/force is bigger than motors with gears. Here developing a robot actuated by pneumatic muscles is described. Some techniques and details of configuration are explained.