Yvan Measson

Human force amplification with industrial robot : Study of dynamic limitations

In the field of comanipulation (i.e. a man and a robot sharing the same task), force amplification is an interesting function that can be achieved by using two force sensors. This technique is known in the literature but little attention has been paid so far to stability/passivity properties. We will explain how to deal with passivity based stability criteria, and point out performance limitations of such a control in case of noncollocated and bandwidth limited force sensors. Theoretical, as well as experimental results will be presented.

Robotic skin structure and performances for industrial robot comanipulation

The everyday use of robots as collaborative assistance to human workers (cobots) will not be possible until operator safety in robot workspace is guaranteed. Because of their strength and stiffness, efficient security of industrial robots can only be obtained thanks to robotic skin technology. Such a skin must have an optimized response time, cover curved shape and large surface of robot segments, be reliable, simple to build and cost effective. We present such a skin structure with early promising experimental results.

A vision-based method for estimating vibrations of a flexible arm using on-line sinusoidal regression

A vision-based vibration suppression scheme has previously been proposed to control the vibrational behaviour of long-reach arms operating in fusion reactors. In this paper we describe a new method to reconstruct the vibration using sinusoidal regression. This change makes the overall scheme more efficient since it enables the estimation of the tip oscillation whatever its origin may be. Both an exact solution and a simplified method are proposed to solve the regression problem. To limit the trade-off between good tracking capability and quality of the vibration reconstruction, these regression algorithms are performed over a variable-length sliding window. Consequently this paper also describes the change detection scheme used to automatically adjust the window length. Experimental results validate the proposed method.

Overcoming human force amplification limitations in comanipulation tasks with industrial robot

Comanipulation (i.e. a man and a robot sharing the same task) is an emerging robotics field. Despite interesting preliminary results, there is still a number of issues to be fixed for efficient implementation of cobotics, for example in the force amplification case. We will show how to solve problems like apparent inertia limitation, passivity constraints, force transient optimization, etc. Theoretical, as well as experimental results will be presented.