Dariusz Kominiak

On the design, modeling and control of a novel compact aerial manipulator

The aim of this article is to present a novel four-degree-of-freedom aerial manipulator allowing a multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to physically interact with the environment. The proposed design, named CARMA (Compact AeRial MAnipulator), is characterized by low disturbances on the UAV flight dynamics, extended workspace (with regard to its retracted configuration) and fast dynamics (compared to the UAV dynamics). The dynamic model is formulated and a control structure consisting of an inverse kinematics algorithm and independent joint position controllers is presented. Furthermore, the design specifications of the prototype are analyzed in detail, while experimental evaluations are conducted for the extraction of the manipulators workspace and the evaluation of systems tracking capabilities over pick-and-place trajectories. Finally, it is shown that the selected joint position sensors, combined with the derived inverse dynamic algorithm allow to determine the wrenches exerted at the base, due to swift motions of the arm.

Cooperative UAVs as a Tool for Aerial Inspection of the Aging Infrastructure.

This article presents an aerial tool towards the autonomous cooperative coverage and inspection of a 3D infrastructure using multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In the presented approach the UAVs are relying only on their onboard computer and sensory system, deployed for inspection of the 3D structure. In this application each agent covers a different part of the scene autonomously, while avoiding collisions. The visual information collected from the aerial team is collaboratively processed to create the 3D model. The performance of the overall setup has been experimentally evaluated in a realistic outdoor infrastructure inspection experiments, providing sparse and dense 3D reconstruction of the inspected structures.

Towards the development of a novel upper-body pneumatic humanoid: Design and implementation

In this article, the conceptual design of a 14 Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) upper-body pneumatic humanoid is presented. The movement capabilities of this novel robotic setup are achieved via Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs), a form of actuation possessing crucial attributes for the development of biologically-inspired robots. To evaluate the feasibility of the humanoids design properties, a 5-DoF robotic arm is developed and experimentally tested, while being studied from the scope of implementing a robotic structure capable of producing smooth and human-like motion responses, while maintaining the inherent compliance provided by the PAM technology.

Experimental evaluation of a modified obstacle based potential field algorithm for an off-road mobile robot

This article presents an experimental evaluation of a modified obstacle based artificial potential field algorithm for an off-road mobile robot. The first contribution of the presented approach concerns the transformation of the artificial potential field method for the guidance of the vehicle and obstacle avoidance, in order to make it suitable for utilising a visual feedback. The visual feedback is relying on a depth image, provided by the low cost kinect sensor. The second contribution concerns the proposal of a novel scheme for the identification and perception of obstacles. Based on the proposed methodology, the vehicle is capable of categorising the obstacles based on their height in order to alter the calculated forces, for enabling a cognitive decision regarding their avoidance or the driving over them, by utilising the robots off road capabilities. The proposed scheme is highly suggested for off road robots, since in the normal cases, the existence of small rocks, branches, etc. can be accidentally identified as obstacles that could make the robot to avoid them or block its further movement. The performance of the proposed modified potential field algorithm has been experimentally applied and evaluated in multiple robotic exploration scenarios, where from the obtained results the efficiency and the advantages of such a modified scheme have been depicted.

Design and experimental evaluation of a novel sliding mode controller for an articulated vehicle

Abstract This article presents the design and experimental evaluation of a novel sliding mode control scheme, being applied to the case of an articulated vehicle. The proposed sliding mode controller is based on a novel continuous sliding surface, being introduced for reducing the chattering phenomenon, while achieving a better tracking performance and a fast minimization of the corresponding tracking error. The derivation of the sliding mode controller relies on the fully nonlinear kinematic model of the articulated vehicle, while the overall stability of the control scheme is proven based on the Lyapunov’s stability condition. The performance of the established control scheme is being experimentally evaluated through multiple path tracking scenarios on a small scale and fully realistic articulated vehicle.