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To facilitate sensing and physical interaction in remote and/or constrained environments, high-extension, lightweight robot manipulators are easier to transport and reach substantially further than traditional serial chain manipulators. We propose a novel planar 3-degree-of-freedom manipulator that achieves low weight and high extension through the use of a pair of spooling bistable tapes, commonly used in self-retracting tape measures, which are pinched together to form a reconfigurable revolute joint. The pinching action flattens the tapes to produce a localized bending region, resulting in a revolute joint that can change its orientation by cable tension and its location on the tapes though friction-driven movement of the pinching mechanism. We present the design, implementation, kinematic modeling, stiffness behavior of the revolute joint, and quasi-static performance of this manipulator. In particular, we demonstrate the ability of the manipulator to reach specified targets in free space, reach a 2D target with various orientations, and maintain an end-effector angle or stationary bending point while changing the other. The long-term goal of this work is to integrate the manipulator with an aerial robot to enable more capable aerial manipulation.
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Self-Reflective Learning Strategy for Persistent Autonomy of Aerial Manipulators
Abstract Autonomous aerial manipulators have great potentials to assist humans or even fully automate manual labor-intensive tasks such as aerial cleaning, aerial transportation, infrastructure repair, and agricultural inspection and sampling. Reinforcement learning holds the promise of enabling persistent autonomy of aerial manipulators because it can adapt to different situations by automatically learning optimal policies from the interactions between the aerial manipulator and environments. However, the learning process itself could experience failures that can practically endanger the safety of aerial manipulators and hence hinder persistent autonomy. In order to solve this problem, we propose for the aerial manipulator a self-reflective learning strategy that can smartly and safely finding optimal policies for different new situations. This self-reflective manner consists of three steps: identifying the appearance of new situations, re-seeking the optimal policy with reinforcement learning, and evaluating the termination of self-reflection. Numerical simulations demonstrate, compared with conventional learning-based autonomy, our strategy can significantly reduce failures while still can finish the given task.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1652454
- PAR ID:
- 10154805
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASME 2019 Dynamic Systems and Control Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1115/DSCC2019-9086
