Sharif Digital Repository

It is so essential to study a safe dynamics of agricultural mechanical equipment during duty stroke, plus getting a rich information about the nature of the soil under processing and in many cases there are associated simultaneous problems, so the main aim of this study is to create a safe working conditions for such specific equipment to extend their life time span as possible as it could. This study will predict an un-usual working circumstances for agricultural tools including plough of course depending on some automated technologies with fast response supported by smooth working conditions. Simply, the proposed Investigative system consists of a linear potentiometric element with... 

In this research, we want to find a point of the kernel in an unknown star-shaped polygon by a robot with minimal sensing, such that the path is not far from the optimum path. The robot has a gap sensor which detects the dicontinuities (gaps) in its visibility polygon and detects the direction of gaps. The robat can move toward or against these gaps. Also, the robot has a compass, and detects the North, the West, the South and the East. The robot detects the position of gaps between these directions, and also, can move along these directions. In this research, we present an on-line algorithm, by which this robot can find a point of the kernel in an unknown star-shaped polygon. The... 

Modular Robots are group of robots which are made of small components called modules. The advantage of these robots to others is their ability to change physical configuration. Using of these robots in configuration changing due to environmental conditions is popular. While, reconfiguration is one of the most important features in modular robot, it’s the most important concern too. Path planning problem is one of the important problems in robotics .So far, most of presented path planning methods and algorithms are based on fixed-structure and they had little attention to path planning and configuration changing, simultaneously. In this thesis, the Genetic Algorithm is used to find path and... 

Trying both to understand the brain and to emulate some of its strengths has been one of the greatest human desires since ancient times. One of these amazing abilities is recognizing via vision. As a result, image recognition has been turned into one of the most attractive areas of research in Computer Vision field since recently. The challenging problem begins to rise where occlusion, scale, rotation and various light conditions contribute and manipulate the paradigm of image recognition. Although recognitions with these challenging problems are some of the capabilities that the brain has, but these are not all. One of the remarkable abilities of the brain is to recognize concepts through... 

The field of learning from demonstration is the field in which researchers seek to create methods by which a robot can learn and reproduce a skill simply by using the demonstration of the skill. One of the main drawbacks of learning from demonstration methods is their inability to improve the learned skills. To answer this question, the reinforcement learning method can be used. The reinforcement learning approach has the potential to improve the initial skill due to the use of the experience of interacting with the environment. In this project, the dynamic movement primitives algorithm is considered as the learning from demonstration method. The research approach is that first, the dynamic... 

Using learning from demonstration approaches is one of the ways to teach a robot how to perform different skills. In classic methods of learning from demonstration, the subject should wear some sensors and devices which is and expensive way. But, with the progresses that have been made in the context of computer vision, it is possible now to achieve to the same results with less cost. Learning from observation is the approach that would be used in this project to do that. By using this method, when robot watches a video, it tries to understand the behavior of the subject and behave in the same way.The purpose of the project is that the robot learns some social (interactive) skills through... 

Control of parallel robots continues to be a challenging research topic. The structural variety of such robots dictated by the application and function makes such control strategies even more unique. As these robots often require nonlinear control schemes, such research has been focused towards two general controlling computational intelligent methods, namely adaptive (and optimal) control and artificial intelligence (e.g. fuzzy and Neural Net) based control. This study considers Neural Net (NNs) and fuzzy control method in order to propose a control scheme for a newly introduced 5-link parallel robot which has 3 degrees of freedom operating in a single plane environment (i.e. two... 

Most elderly and physically disabled people suffer from lack of functionality and dexterity in their elbow or wrist. These disabilities are due to the damages mostly caused by sport surgery, spinal surgery, or stroke. Therefore, design of an assistive exoskeleton robot for upper limb movements seems necessary. The purpose of this study is to design, fabricate and deliver a control algorithm for an assistive wearable robot. The robot has two degrees of freedom in order to help the flexion/extension of elbow and wrist. Furthermore, various kinds of control systems incorporated in rehabilitation robots are investigated and their advantages and drawbacks are compared. Then, some conventional... 

Human walking is widely recognized as one of the most adaptable and robust forms of locomotion in nature, with intricate neural and biomechanical systems interacting to support this complex behavior. It is proposed that these systems are organized in a hierarchical structure, with the lower level comprising a complex distributed system consisting of muscles and the spinal cord, and the higher level being the brain cortex. The higher level is responsible for training and monitoring the output of the lower level, and intervening when the lower system fails to stabilize the system. To control the lower level, one popular model that has emerged is the central pattern generator (CPG). It is... 

In this thesis control of wheeled mobile manipulators for cooperative object transportation is investigated. Full dynamic model of a mobile manipulator with a three wheeled mobile base and a three DOF manipulator is derived using Gibbs-Appell method. Input-output linearization technique is used to control individual robots. Transporting the object is divided into two steps, first robots use a decentralized behavior-based method to approach and surround the object. Then virtual structure method is used to control the robots to transport the object cooperatively. Simulation results with three robots handling an object are presented to show the effectiveness of proposed method  

Control of line of sight (LOS) orientation is a fundamental prerequisite for virtually all dynamic applications in which an optical sensor is used to obtain images. In this research, a 3 DOF parallel mechanism is utilized to build a stable platform for high precision satellite photography. The platform may be designed based on the Stewart platform concept. The stability is obtained by controlling the roll, pitch and yaw of the mechanism. To apply linear control techniques and to use roll-pitch and yaw rates and also their absolute values, an active stable platform is designed. Line Of Sight (LOS) is a position vector from origin of a topocentric-horizontal system to the satellite of... 

The purpose of determining orientation and position of a rigid-body is specifying its attitude and position with respect to a specified reference frame in order to using in controller. Since there is no sensor that can directly measures the attitude and position, we have to estimate those variables by observers. In this thesis we derive a new and explicit neccesary and sufficient condition for observability of the rigid-body kinematic equation. Also we propose a new observer for estimating the attitude and position of the rigid-body. The special feature of the proposed estimator is that it use only a single landmark and is globally and exponentially stable. In the next step we study the... 

The idea of using groups of simple autonomous robots instead of one or limited number of very sophisticated robots is inspired by flocking behaviors of animals. Distributed control structures and artificial swarming have attracted lots of studies in robotics. There are many applications for robotic swarms in which members are very simple robots with low communication capabilities. These robots communicate only within very limited distances. In this thesis, a homogenous robotic swarm with at least two robots is assumed. Swarm robots are considered to be dimensionless with no time delay, which is a normal assumption in this field of studies. Robots move in planar space and their behaviors are... 

This thesis studies a brachiation robot that is a long armed locomotion similar to apes. The robot has 2 revolute joints but only one of them is actuated. In this thesis, after deriving dynamic model of the robot, the Controlled Lagrangian (CL) method is used for stabilization. The matching conditions satisfied for the controller are derived and the extended λ-method is used to solve PDE’s involved in the method of controlled lagrangian. Satisfactory controller’s gains are chosen by PSO algorithm. Feasibility of the developed controller is investigated by numerical simulations and finally, theoretical results are validated with experimental observations  

• Brachiation robot is a kind of under-actuated robots. A brachiating robot is a type of a mobile arm that is capable of moving from branch to branch similar to a long-armed ape. The purpose of this thesis is control of a two link Brachiation robot. The purpose of this thesis is control of a two link Brachiation robot using neural network and geometry control. For this purpose a genetic algorithm based training Neural Network is used to produce a suitable path for the second link of the robot and then using input-output linearization method, the second link is controlled to follow the path. The simulations shows that the Nero Controller designed in this thesis is suitable. The controller can... 

In this thesis, modeling and robust sliding mode control of a snake-like robot with holonomic constraints in tracking of desired paths such as serpenoidal motion is addressed. By considering more real conditions and holonomic constraints, the kinematic and dynamic equations of a semi active robot are obtained using Kane's method. In the next step, based on the obtained results, diverse control theory for getting ability of tracking different paths in environment with different frictions are investigated. Robust control theory is chose to design a controller that has ability of adaption robot’s motion in different environments. For this reason, Sliding Mode Control that has many applications... 

In this study, at first modeling of a self-propelled microrobot and its hydrodynamic effects on flow field are investigated. Then, a cascade controller has been designed for the fully actuated microrobot in order to track the desired time trajectories. Next, in order to design an optimal controller to decrease energy consumption, regardless of tracking the desired orientation trajectory compared to the desired position trajectory, the fully actuated microrobot would change to over actuated microrobot. Thus, it would be able to orient freely itself according to the flow field so that reduce the energy consumption. By applying the optimal controller on the over actuated microrobot, it was... 

The main purpose of the present thesis is to establish a decentralized controller for some car–like multi robots to follow and hunt moving targets. Robots are very similar to actual cars considering geometric dimensions, mass and moment of inertia and so on; and outputs of the controller are steering-wheel and driving-wheel torques appropriately. Dynamics of the moving target is so that it escapes from the robots. Robots are equipped with antenna for getting wireless sensory signals, including range and bearing sensors. Kalman filter is used for estimation the target relative position and speed and robots state variables. The controller is designed for doing the above mentioned group...