Robot Motion Planner for Under-Constrained Trajectories With Part-Specific Geometric Variances

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ademola Oridate ◽  
Mitchell Pryor ◽  
Carolyn Seepersad

Abstract Industrial manipulators often interact with large and complex objects for a variety of automation tasks. Finding a feasible path for the robot end-effector that ensures task success is often non-trivial due to considerations such as reachability, singularity avoidance, and collision avoidance. This paper proposes an approach to expand the search space for feasible robot trajectories (and search for an optimal solution) by taking advantage of task redundancy for certain tasks while ensuring task completion. The effort builds on previous work enabling virtual fixture generation for complex shapes given CAD or scan data. The proposed method has been developed into a trajectory planning library on the ROS (Robot Operating System) framework and tested by simulating an interaction of a six-axis industrial robot with an aircraft fuselage. Results show increased coverage of task area with minimal robot base placements.

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-505
Author(s):  
G. Kulathunga ◽  
◽  
D. Devitt ◽  
R. Fedorenko ◽  
A. Klimchik ◽  
...  

Any obstacle-free path planning algorithm, in general, gives a sequence of waypoints that connect start and goal positions by a sequence of straight lines, which does not ensure the smoothness and the dynamic feasibility to maneuver the MAV. Kinodynamic-based motion planning is one of the ways to impose dynamic feasibility in planning. However, kinodynamic motion planning is not an optimal solution due to high computational demands for real-time applications. Thus, we explore path planning followed by kinodynamic smoothing while ensuring the dynamic feasibility of MAV. The main difference in the proposed technique is not to use kinodynamic planning when finding a feasible path, but rather to apply kinodynamic smoothing along the obtained feasible path. We have chosen a geometric-based path planning algorithm “RRT*” as the path finding algorithm. In the proposed technique, we modified the original RRT* introducing an adaptive search space and a steering function that helps to increase the consistency of the planner. Moreover, we propose a multiple RRT* that generates a set of desired paths. The optimal path from the generated paths is selected based on a cost function. Afterwards, we apply kinodynamic smoothing that will result in a dynamically feasible as well as obstacle-free path. Thereafter, a b-spline-based trajectory is generated to maneuver the vehicle autonomously in unknown environments. Finally, we have tested the proposed technique in various simulated environments. According to the experiment results, we were able to speed up the path planning task by 1.3 times when using the proposed multiple RRT* over the original RRT*.


Author(s):  
D. N. Radnaev ◽  
Yu. А. Sergeev ◽  
А. А. Abiduev ◽  
S. V. Petunov

Currently, agricultural science and practice has a large amount of experimental data that need to be taken into account in the development of new technological processes and working bodies. Therefore, there is a need to design technical processes in order to identify their effectiveness. In this regard, the use of methods of synthesis of technological processes based on the characteristics of tillage, seeding and production system of the economy, in which it is necessary to implement the projected process. In the General statement of the problem, the design of technological processes is one of the complex problems with the following characteristic feature: lack of knowledge about the methods of designing technological processes, suitable for system - structural modeling and algorithmization of design processes. To overcome this incompleteness, a systematic approach is needed. The system approach proceeds from the fact that the specificity of complex objects and processes is not limited to the features of its constituent parts and elements, but lies in the nature of relationships and relationships between them. In this paper, the design methodology is based on the formulated fundamental assumptions and principles of the whole system of more specific statements, revealing the structure and content of design operations, the synthesis of the choice of solutions. The principles of technological compatibility and emergence suitable for system-structural analysis of complex technical means and technological processes, consisting of statements having a hierarchical structure, where the degree of detail of the goals from level to level increases, and the approval of the last level determines the direction of the search for the optimal solution to the problem.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Zheping Yan ◽  
Jinzhong Zhang ◽  
Jialing Tang

The accuracy and stability of relative pose estimation of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and a target depend on whether the characteristics of the underwater image can be accurately and quickly extracted. In this paper, a whale optimization algorithm (WOA) based on lateral inhibition (LI) is proposed to solve the image matching and vision-guided AUV docking problem. The proposed method is named the LI-WOA. The WOA is motivated by the behavior of humpback whales, and it mainly imitates encircling prey, bubble-net attacking and searching for prey to obtain the globally optimal solution in the search space. The WOA not only balances exploration and exploitation but also has a faster convergence speed, higher calculation accuracy and stronger robustness than other approaches. The lateral inhibition mechanism can effectively perform image enhancement and image edge extraction to improve the accuracy and stability of image matching. The LI-WOA combines the optimization efficiency of the WOA and the matching accuracy of the LI mechanism to improve convergence accuracy and the correct matching rate. To verify its effectiveness and feasibility, the WOA is compared with other algorithms by maximizing the similarity between the original image and the template image. The experimental results show that the LI-WOA has a better average value, a higher correct rate, less execution time and stronger robustness than other algorithms. The LI-WOA is an effective and stable method for solving the image matching and vision-guided AUV docking problem.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 6708
Author(s):  
Hamza Mubarak ◽  
Nurulafiqah Nadzirah Mansor ◽  
Hazlie Mokhlis ◽  
Mahazani Mohamad ◽  
Hasmaini Mohamad ◽  
...  

Demand for continuous and reliable power supply has significantly increased, especially in this Industrial Revolution 4.0 era. In this regard, adequate planning of electrical power systems considering persistent load growth, increased integration of distributed generators (DGs), optimal system operation during N-1 contingencies, and compliance to the existing system constraints are paramount. However, these issues need to be parallelly addressed for optimum distribution system planning. Consequently, the planning optimization problem would become more complex due to the various technical and operational constraints as well as the enormous search space. To address these considerations, this paper proposes a strategy to obtain one optimal solution for the distribution system expansion planning by considering N-1 system contingencies for all branches and DG optimal sizing and placement as well as fluctuations in the load profiles. In this work, a hybrid firefly algorithm and particle swarm optimization (FA-PSO) was proposed to determine the optimal solution for the expansion planning problem. The validity of the proposed method was tested on IEEE 33- and 69-bus systems. The results show that incorporating DGs with optimal sizing and location minimizes the investment and power loss cost for the 33-bus system by 42.18% and 14.63%, respectively, and for the 69-system by 31.53% and 12%, respectively. In addition, comparative studies were done with a different model from the literature to verify the robustness of the proposed method.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 168781402110195
Author(s):  
Jianwen Guo ◽  
Xiaoyan Li ◽  
Zhenpeng Lao ◽  
Yandong Luo ◽  
Jiapeng Wu ◽  
...  

Fault diagnosis is of great significance to improve the production efficiency and accuracy of industrial robots. Compared with the traditional gradient descent algorithm, the extreme learning machine (ELM) has the advantage of fast computing speed, but the input weights and the hidden node biases that are obtained at random affects the accuracy and generalization performance of ELM. However, the level-based learning swarm optimizer algorithm (LLSO) can quickly and effectively find the global optimal solution of large-scale problems, and can be used to solve the optimal combination of large-scale input weights and hidden biases in ELM. This paper proposes an extreme learning machine with a level-based learning swarm optimizer (LLSO-ELM) for fault diagnosis of industrial robot RV reducer. The model is tested by combining the attitude data of reducer gear under different fault modes. Compared with ELM, the experimental results show that this method has good stability and generalization performance.


Author(s):  
Ozan G. Erol ◽  
Hakan Gurocak ◽  
Berk Gonenc

MR-brakes work by varying viscosity of a magnetorheological (MR) fluid inside the brake. This electronically controllable viscosity leads to variable friction torque generated by the actuator. A properly designed MR-brake can have a high torque-to-volume ratio which is quite desirable for an actuator. However, designing an MR-brake is a complex process as there are many parameters involved in the design which can affect the size and torque output significantly. The contribution of this study is a new design approach that combines the Taguchi design of experiments method with parameterized finite element analysis for optimization. Unlike the typical multivariate optimization methods, this approach can identify the dominant parameters of the design and allows the designer to only explore their interactions during the optimization process. This unique feature reduces the size of the search space and the time it takes to find an optimal solution. It normally takes about a week to design an MR-brake manually. Our interactive method allows the designer to finish the design in about two minutes. In this paper, we first present the details of the MR-brake design problem. This is followed by the details of our new approach. Next, we show how to design an MR-brake using this method. Prototype of a new brake was fabricated. Results of experiments with the prototype brake are very encouraging and are in close agreement with the theoretical performance predictions.


Complexity ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guojiang Xiong ◽  
Jing Zhang ◽  
Xufeng Yuan ◽  
Dongyuan Shi ◽  
Yu He ◽  
...  

Economic dispatch (ED) is of cardinal significance for the power system operation. It is mathematically a typical complex nonlinear multivariable strongly coupled optimization problem with equality and inequality constraints, especially considering the valve-point effects. In order to effectively solve the problem, a simple yet very young and efficient population-based algorithm named across neighborhood search (ANS) is implemented in this paper. In ANS, a group of individuals collaboratively navigate through the search space for obtaining the optimal solution by simultaneously searching the neighborhoods of multiple superior solutions. Four benchmark test cases with diverse complexities and characteristics are firstly employed to comprehensively verify the feasibility and effectiveness of ANS. The experimental and comparison results fully demonstrate the superiority of ANS in terms of the final solution quality, convergence speed, robustness, and statistics. In addition, the sensitivities of ANS to variations of population size and across-search degree are studied. Furthermore, ANS is applied to a practical provincial power grid of China. All the comparison results consistently indicate that ANS is highly competitive and can be used as a promising alternative for ED problems.


2021 ◽  
Vol 297 ◽  
pp. 01055
Author(s):  
Mohamed El Ansari ◽  
Ilyas El Jaafari ◽  
Lahcen Koutti

This paper proposes a new edge based stereo matching approach for road applications. The new approach consists in matching the edge points extracted from the input stereo images using temporal constraints. At the current frame, we propose to estimate a disparity range for each image line based on the disparity map of its preceding one. The stereo images are divided into multiple parts according to the estimated disparity ranges. The optimal solution of each part is independently approximated via the state-of-the-art energy minimization approach Graph cuts. The disparity search space at each image part is very small compared to the global one, which improves the results and reduces the execution time. Furthermore, as a similarity criterion between corresponding edge points, we propose a new cost function based on the intensity, the gradient magnitude and gradient orientation. The proposed method has been tested on virtual stereo images, and it has been compared to a recently proposed method and the results are satisfactory.


2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milan Cisty ◽  
Zbynek Bajtek ◽  
Lubomir Celar

In this work, an optimal design of a water distribution network is proposed for large irrigation networks. The proposed approach is built upon an existing optimization method (NSGA-II), but the authors are proposing its effective application in a new two-step optimization process. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that not only is the choice of method important for obtaining good optimization results, but also how that method is applied. The proposed methodology utilizes as its most important feature the ensemble approach, in which more optimization runs cooperate and are used together. The authors assume that the main problem in finding the optimal solution for a water distribution optimization problem is the very large size of the search space in which the optimal solution should be found. In the proposed method, a reduction of the search space is suggested, so the final solution is thus easier to find and offers greater guarantees of accuracy (closeness to the global optimum). The method has been successfully tested on a large benchmark irrigation network.


Author(s):  
Victer Paul ◽  
Ganeshkumar C ◽  
Jayakumar L

Genetic algorithms (GAs) are a population-based meta-heuristic global optimization technique for dealing with complex problems with a very large search space. The population initialization is a crucial task in GAs because it plays a vital role in the convergence speed, problem search space exploration, and also the quality of the final optimal solution. Though the importance of deciding problem-specific population initialization in GA is widely recognized, it is hardly addressed in the literature. In this article, different population seeding techniques for permutation-coded genetic algorithms such as random, nearest neighbor (NN), gene bank (GB), sorted population (SP), and selective initialization (SI), along with three newly proposed ordered-distance-vector-based initialization techniques have been extensively studied. The ability of each population seeding technique has been examined in terms of a set of performance criteria, such as computation time, convergence rate, error rate, average convergence, convergence diversity, nearest-neighbor ratio, average distinct solutions and distribution of individuals. One of the famous combinatorial hard problems of the traveling salesman problem (TSP) is being chosen as the testbed and the experiments are performed on large-sized benchmark TSP instances obtained from standard TSPLIB. The scope of the experiments in this article is limited to the initialization phase of the GA and this restricted scope helps to assess the performance of the population seeding techniques in their intended phase alone. The experimentation analyses are carried out using statistical tools to claim the unique performance characteristic of each population seeding techniques and best performing techniques are identified based on the assessment criteria defined and the nature of the application.


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