Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This paper describes a personal service robot developed for assisting a user in his/her daily life. One of the important aspects of such robots is the user-friendliness in communication; especially, the easiness of user’s assistance to a robot is important in making the robot perform various kinds of tasks. Our robot has the following three features: (1) interactive object recognition, (2) robust speech recognition, and (3) easy teaching of mobile manipulation. The robot is applied to the task of fetching a can from a distant refrigerator.

This paper describes our continued work of a unique robotics project, Comprehensive Access to Printed Materials (CAPM), within the context of libraries. As libraries provide a growing array of digital library services and resources, they continue to acquire large quantities of printed material. This combined pressure of providing electronic and print-based resources and services has led to severe space constraints for many libraries, especially academic research libraries. Consequently, many libraries have built or plan to build off-site shelving facilities to accommodate printed materials. An autonomous mobile robotic library system has been developed to retrieve items from bookshelves and carry them to scanning stations located in the off-site shelving facility. This paper reviews the overall design of the robot system and control systems, and reports the new improvement in the accuracy of the robot performance; in particular, the pick-up process.

In this paper we report on the First International Contest for Cleaning Robots, which took place jointly with IROS 2002 in Lausanne, Switzerland. The event had two primary objectives. As an educational event with a significant fun factor it was supposed to attract the brainpower and activate the creativeness of students and young researchers for an application of service robotics, which has a significant economic potential. The cost for commercial cleaning services is estimated at around US$ 50 billion per year only in Europe. A fair contest, of course, required that all contestants had equal race conditions, This in turn required to have a well-define set up, which could be reproduced for every contest team and for any single run. With that, the second major objective of the event, which was to define a benchmark for robotic cleaning, was a natural byproduct of organizing a fair contest.

Since 1993 we have been working on the automation of dragline excavators, the largest earthmoving machines that exist. Recently we completed a large-scale experimental program where the automation system was used for production purposes over a two week period and moved over 200,000 tonnes of overburden. This is a landmark achievement in the history of automated excavation. In this paper we briefly describe the robotic system and how it works cooperatively with the machine operator. We then describe our methodology for gauging machine performance, analyze results from the production trial and comment on the effectiveness of the system that we have created.

This paper describes recent advances in the development of an integrated inertial guidance system for automation of the longwall coal mining process. Significant advances in longwall automation are being achieved through an industry sponsored project which targets productivity and safety benefits. Stabilised inertial navigation techniques are being successfully employed to accurately measure the three-dimensional path of the longwall shearer. This enabling technology represents a breakthrough in achieving practical and reliable automated face alignment. This paper also describes a specification for the interconnection of underground mining equipment based on the newly developed EtherNet/IP control and information protocol which ensures equipment compatibility across multi-vendor components of the automation system.

This paper describes the development of a new autonomous conveyor and bolting machine (ACBM) used for the rapid development of roadways in underground coal mines. The ACBM is a mobile platform fitted with four independent bolting rigs, bolt storage and delivery carousel, coal receiving hopper and through-conveyor for coal transport. The ACBM is designed to operate in concert with a standard continuous mining machine during the roadway development process to automatically insert roof and wall bolts for securing the roadway. This innovative machine offers significant benefits for increasing personnel safety and improving productivity. The paper describes the core sensing and processing technologies involved in realizing the level of automation required by the ACBM, which includes online roof monitoring, roadway profiling, navigation, and automatic control of drilling and bolting processes.

Mining operations depend on current, accurate maps of adjacent mine works to limit the risks of encroachment and breaching. Adjacent mines may be decades or centuries old with missing, inaccurate, or ambiguous maps. Dangers such as flooding, roof-fall, rotten support timbers, and poor ventilation preclude human entry to survey these spaces. Only robots may enter and directly observe these otherwise inaccessible underground voids, providing incontrovertible evidence of the mine’s existence and extent. This presents the configuration of a mobile mine mapping robot, Groundhog, and results from three deployments into coal mines.

For several years, our research group has been developing methods for automated modeling of 3D environments. In September, 2002, we were given the opportunity to demonstrate our mapping capability in an underground coal mine. The opportunity arose as a result of the Quecreek mine accident, in which an inaccurate map caused miners to breach an abandoned, water-filled mine, trapping them for several days. Our field test illustrates the feasibility and potential of high resolution three-dimensional (3D) mapping of an underground coal mine using a cart-mounted 3D laser scanner. This paper presents our experimental setup, the automatic 3D modeling method used, and the results of the field test. In addition, we address issues related to laser sensing in a coal mine environment.

There is a strong demand for efficient lifesaving techniques and devices in preparation for large-scale earthquakes. We focus on searching survivors and develop the rescue robot “Pneumatic-Drive Expandable Arm.” That is an elastic arm type robot driven by pneumatic pressure and has a camera on the head. That can travel stably in the rubble-strewn environment where electric power or wireless communication is not available.

This paper proposes a sufferers searching system using the group of robots to find sufferers at debris as quickly as possible in urban disaster. Five kind of new robots (Series UMRS-V) have developed as the searching robots and their hardware and software systems included the feature and mechanism, sensor system, data processing and control system have made clear. The human interface and simulator system have also developed to make the communication between robots and operator easy and to study the searching algorithm etc.