While the locomotion performance of legged robots over flat terrain or known obstacles has improved over the past few decades, they have yet to equal the performance of their animal counterparts over variable terrain. This work analyzes a multi-legged reduced order model of cockroach locomotion on variable slopes which will...
To design and precisely control a manipulator requires
developing an efficient dynamic model of the system. The
present work demonstrates how this can be accomplished by
employing Kane's dynamical equations. First, a detailed
manual derivation of the equations of motion for a
particular robot is presented in such way that...
Computer control of a robot arm's motion requires kinematic algorithms for relating the state of a particular arm's joints to the position and orientation of its tool in three-dimensional space. To design such algorithms requires mathematical formulation of the kinematics of the arm. The resulting long, tedious algebraic manipulations suggest...
Sprawled-posture insects exhibit a remarkable ability to rapidly run in a stable manner
over complex terrain, a feat that has yet to be equaled by man-made legged robots.
Recent experimental results suggest that these insects may employ a hierarchical
control structure, in which locomotion performance emerges from a combination of...
Multiphase flow dynamics are important in many naval and turbomachinery applications, where bubble interaction with low pressure, vortical structures can lead to undesirable cavitation effects. To better understand the underlying phenomena, a multiscale numerical framework is developed to simulate bubble laden flow in dynamic hydro propulsion systems. Several subproblems in...
Recent developments in estimation of the survivability of a U.S. Navy transport barge in random seas are extended to improve accuracy. The single Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) model of a extreme roll response of a barge used in previous research is replaced by a 3-DOF roll-heave-sway model to include linear and nonlinear...
Coordinating multiple robots to achieve a complex task requires solving two distinct control problems: the high-level control problem of ensuring that each robot aims to perform a useful task (e.g., coordination) and the low-level control problem of ensuring that each robot actually performs the correct actions to achieve its task...
The micropolar equations of motion are developed, in a very general form, for a
mixture of fluid and solid particles. The fluid is allowed to move differently than the solids,
and the solids are modeled as a micropolar continuum. That is, the solid particles have an
additional degree of freedom...
We investigate a search and coverage planning problem, where an area of interest has to be explored by a number of vehicles, given a fixed time budget. A good coverage plan has a low probability of a target remaining unobserved. We introduce a formal problem statement, suggest a greedy algorithm...