Humberto Ferasoli Filho

Pomodoro, a mobile robot platform for hand motion exercising

According to the World Report on Disability, currently 93 million children experience some kind of moderate or severe disability. Several systems including motion capture, serious games, exoskeletons and robotics have been researched and developed for assisting them on recovering basic functionality and daily activities, thus, improving mobility and providing a better quality of life. The popularization of these tools is a challenging task due to the required technical knowledge and the high acquisition costs, yet, the field of didactic robots is growing as an alternative that can be used in education, research, entertainment and other scenarios. This project proposes the development of the Pomodoro mobile robot as a device for encouraging hand motion exercise through flexion/extension and ulnar/radial deviation movements, for teleoperating the system in users experiencing reduced hand mobility. The system is composed of a low cost non-holonomic robot controlled with an embedded smartphone for on-site interactions through speech, image recognition and touch controls, along with a complimentary hand motion tracking subsystem for teleoperating the system using both real and virtual system, while recording position and orientation data for further assessment.

Conceptual Bases of Robot Navigation Modeling, Control and Applications

The advancements of the research on Mobile Robots with high degree of autonomy is possible, on one hand, due to its broad perspective of applications and, on other hand, due to the development and reduction of costs on computer, electronic and mechanic systems. Together with the research in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, this scenario currently enables the proposition of ambitious and complex robotic projects. Most of the applications were developed outside the structured environment of industry assembly lines and have complex goals, such as planets exploration, transportation of parts in factories, manufacturing, cleaning and monitoring of households, handling of radioactive materials in nuclear power plants, inspection of volcanoes, and many other activities. This chapter presents and discusses the main topics involved on the design or adoption of a mobile robot system and focus on the control and navigation systems for autonomous mobile robots. Thus, this chapter is organized as follows: • The Section 2 introduces the main aspects of the Robot design, such as: the conceptualization of the mobile robot physical structure and its relation to the world; the state of art of navigation methods and systems; and the control architectures which enables high degree of autonomy. • The Section 3 presents the dynamic and control analysis for navigation robots with kinematic and dynamic model of the differential and omnidirectional robots. • And finally, Section 4 presents applications for a robotic platform of Automation, Simulation, Control and Supervision of Navegation Robots, with studies of dynamic and kinematic modeling, control algorithms, mechanisms for mapping and localization, trajectory planning and the platform simulator.

A Self-Healing Architecture for Web Service-Based Applications

Web service-based application is an architectural style, where a collection of Web services communicates to each other to execute processes. With the popularity increase of developing Web service-based application and once Web services may change, in terms of functional and non-functional quality of service (QoS), we need mechanisms to monitor, diagnose, and repair Web services into a Web application. This work presents a description of self-healing architecture that deals with these mechanisms. Other contributions of this paper are using the proxy server to measure Web service QoS values and to employ some strategies to recovery the effects from misbehaved Web services.

Mobile robotic teleoperation using gesture-based human interfaces

In this work a natural interaction framework for programming a mobile robot with gestures is developed using two low-cost human interface devices available on the market. The use of natural motion has been growing among user interface researches and developers for offering comfortable ways of interacting with the devices around us. Some examples can be seen in how touch screens, accelerometers and image processing have influenced our interactions with cellphones, gaming devices and computers, thus, allowing us to take advantage of our body ergonomics. The objective of this work is to integrate an intuitive tool for teleoperating a mobile robot through gestures as an alternative input for encouraging non-experts to relate with robotics and ease navigation tasks. For accomplishing the objective of this work, the mobile robots programming architecture is studied and integrated with those of the user interfaces for allowing the teleoperation of the robotics device. To check how the implemented framework impacts the user interaction, a navigation scenario with obstacles is used for validating the suitability of the gesture-based navigation.

Environment for Teaching and Development of Mobile Robot Systems

Using robots for teaching is one approach that has gathered good results on Middle-School, High-School and Universities. Robotics gives chance to experiment concepts of a broad range of disciplines, principally those from Engineering courses and Computer Science. However, there are not many kits that enables the use of robotics in classroom. This article describes the methodologies to implement tools which serves as test beds for the use of robotics to teach Computer Science and Engineering. Therefore, it proposes the development of a flexible, low cost hardware to integrate sensors and control actuators commonly found on mobile robots, the development of a mobile robot device whose sensors and actuators allows the experimentation of different concepts, and an environment for the implementation of control algorithms through a computer network. This paper describes each one of these tools and discusses the implementation issues and future works.

Intelligent Control Architecture for Assistive Mobile Robots

The current technology has provided the necessary means for creating better assistive tools. Among these tools, the interest on assistive robotics has been growing, since its cost is being reduced and new equipment is introduced on the market. Yet, developing robots for aiding therapy is not an easy task because robotics is intrinsically multidisciplinary. Among the several research fields contributing to robotics research, two are of particular interest: control architectures and human–robot interaction. This paper covers ongoing research projects on assistive mobile robots for child rehabilitation developed in collaboration with Brazilian and Colombian Universities and proposes an intelligent control architecture based on human–robot interaction for assistive applications. Furthermore, it presents a case study on assistive robots for special education.

A proposed neural control for the trajectory tracking of a nonholonomic mobile robot with disturbances

In this paper, a trajectory tracking control problem for a nonholonomic mobile robot by the integration of a kinematic neural controller (KNC) and a torque neural controller (TNC) is proposed, where both the kinematic and dynamic models contains disturbances. The KNC is a variable structure controller (VSC) based on the sliding mode control theory (SMC), and applied to compensate the kinematic disturbances. The TNC is a inertia-based controller constituted of a dynamic neural controller (DNC) and a robust neural compensator (RNC), and applied to compensate the mobile robot dynamics, and bounded unknown disturbances. Stability analysis with basis on Lyapunov method and simulations results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.