Wanliang Wang

Active Illumination for Robot Vision

A vision sensor is the robots eye to perceive its environment, but the perception performance can be significantly affected by illumination conditions. This paper presents strategies of adaptive illumination control for robot vision to achieve the best scene interpretation. It investigates how to obtain the most comfortable illumination conditions for a vision sensor. In a comfort condition the image reflects the natural properties of the concerned object. Discomfort may occur if some scene information is lost. Strategies are proposed to optimize the pose and optical parameters of the luminaire and the sensor, with emphasis on controlling the intensity and avoiding glare.

Runtime reconfiguration of a modular mobile robot with serial and parallel mechanisms

This paper presents a novel field robot JL-I based on a reconfigurable concept for urban search and rescue applications. The robot consists of three identical modules; each module is an entire robotic system that can perform distributed activities. It features three-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) active joints actuated by serial and parallel mechanisms for changing shape and flexible docking mechanism. The docking mechanism enables adjacent modules to connect or disconnect flexibly and automatically. DOF analysis, working space analysis and the kinematics of the 3D active joint between connected modules are studied thoroughly. In the end a series of successful tests confirm the principles and the robots capabilities.

From the biological model to a small climbing caterpillar robot

This paper presents an overview of an ongoing project on a bio-inspired climbing caterpillar robot. First, an investigation on locomotion kinematics adopted by climbing robots is presented. After that, a related survey on the natural creatures which can climb on vertical surfaces in different materials is given. The special attention is emphasised on the natural caterpillars locomotion mechanism. In this project, we combine climbing techniques with a modular approach to realise a novel prototype as a flexible wall climbing robotic platform featuring an easy-to-build mechanical structure, a low-frequency vibrating passive attachment principle and various locomotion capabilities. The research objects, system design and current achievements are presented step by step. In the end, a conclusion is given and the future work is outlined.