Teaching Mechanism Calibration to Engineering Students

2014 ◽  
Vol 615 ◽  
pp. 171-176
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Majarena ◽  
Jorge Santolaria ◽  
David Samper ◽  
Juan Jose Aguilar Martín

A new practical application for teaching mechanism calibration to engineering students in senior undergraduate courses is presented in this paper. The modelling, characterization and calibration of kinematic mechanisms is performed. This application presents a special interest in kinematic mechanisms in areas such as industry and research. The application interface allows the students to carry out the different steps of the calibration procedure in an easy way, to change different variables and to analyze results. This application therefore presents an important utility as a teaching tool for the learning process and analysis of the different steps in the mechanism optimization. The application developed allows students: to design their own mechanisms and to analyze the mechanism workspace by changing some design parameters, to test accuracy and repeatability of mechanism components, to introduce the mechanism kinematic model, to evaluate the mechanism performance before calibration, to calibrate the mechanism and, finally, to analyze the improvement in the system accuracy.

Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 1263
Author(s):  
Zhaojun Wang ◽  
Jiangning Wang ◽  
Congtian Lin ◽  
Yan Han ◽  
Zhaosheng Wang ◽  
...  

With the rapid development of digital technology, bird images have become an important part of ornithology research data. However, due to the rapid growth of bird image data, it has become a major challenge to effectively process such a large amount of data. In recent years, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have shown great potential and effectiveness in a variety of tasks regarding the automatic processing of bird images. However, no research has been conducted on the recognition of habitat elements in bird images, which is of great help when extracting habitat information from bird images. Here, we demonstrate the recognition of habitat elements using four DCNN models trained end-to-end directly based on images. To carry out this research, an image database called Habitat Elements of Bird Images (HEOBs-10) and composed of 10 categories of habitat elements was built, making future benchmarks and evaluations possible. Experiments showed that good results can be obtained by all the tested models. ResNet-152-based models yielded the best test accuracy rate (95.52%); the AlexNet-based model yielded the lowest test accuracy rate (89.48%). We conclude that DCNNs could be efficient and useful for automatically identifying habitat elements from bird images, and we believe that the practical application of this technology will be helpful for studying the relationships between birds and habitat elements.


Author(s):  
Yang Cao ◽  
Jingyan Dong

Abstract Soft electrothermal actuators have drawn extensive attention in recent years for their promising applications in biomimetic and biomedical areas. Most soft electrothermal actuators reported so far demonstrated uniform bending deformation, due to the deposition based fabrication of the conductive heater layer from nanomaterial-based solutions, which generally provides uniform heating capacity and uniform bending deformation. In this paper, a soft electrothermal actuator that can provide twisting deformation was designed and fabricated. A metallic microfilament heater of the soft twisting actuator was directly printed using electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing, and embedded between two structural layers, a polyimide (PI) film and a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) layer, with distinct thermal expansion properties. Assisted by the direct patterning capabilities of EHD printing, a skewed heater pattern was designed and printed. This skewed heater pattern not only produces a skewed parallelogram-shaped temperature field, but also changes the stiffness anisotropy of the actuator, leading to twisting deformation with coupled bending. A theoretical kinematic model was built for the twisting actuator to describe its twisting deformation under different actuation effects. Based on that model, influence of design parameters on the twisting angle and motion trajectory of the twisting actuator were studied and validated by experiments. Finite element analysis (FEA) was utilized for the thermal and deformation analysis of the actuator. The fabricated twisting actuator was characterized on its heating and twisting performance at different supply voltages. Using three twisting actuators, a soft gripper was designed and fabricated to implement pick-and-place operations of delicate objects.


Author(s):  
S. Kaizerman ◽  
B. Benhabib ◽  
R. G. Fenton ◽  
G. Zak

Abstract A new robot kinematic calibration procedure is presented. The parameters of the kinematic model are estimated through a relationship established between the deviations in the joint variables and the deviations in the model parameters. Thus, the new method can be classified as an inverse calibration procedure. Using suitable sensitivity analysis methods, the matrix of the partial derivatives of joint variables with respect to robot parameters is calculated without having explicit expressions of joint variables as a function of task space coordinates (closed inverse kinematic solution). This matrix provides the relationship between the changes in the joint variables and the changes in the parameter values required for the calibration. Two deterministic sensitivity analysis methods are applied, namely the Direct Sensitivity Approach and the Adjoint Sensitivity Method. The new calibration procedure was successfully tested by the simulated calibrations of a two degree of freedom revolute-joint planar manipulator.


Author(s):  
G. Zak ◽  
R. G. Fenton ◽  
B. Benhabib

Abstract Most industrial robots cannot be off-line programmed to carry out a task accurately, unless their kinematic model is suitably corrected through a calibration procedure. However, proper calibration is an expensive and time-consuming procedure due to the highly accurate measurement equipment required and due to the significant amount of data that must be collected. To improve the efficiency of robot calibration, an optimization procedure is proposed in this paper. The objective of minimizing the cost of the calibration is combined with the objective of minimizing the residual error after calibration in one multiple-objective optimization. Prediction of the residual error for a given calibration process presents the main difficulty for implementing the optimization. It is proposed that the residual error is expressed as a polynomial function. This function is obtained as a result of fitting a response surface to either experimental or simulated sample estimates of the residual error. The optimization problem is then solved by identifying a reduced set of possible solutions, thus greatly simplifying the decision maker’s choice of an effective calibration procedure. An application example of this method is also included.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 00167
Author(s):  
Jarosław Sowiński ◽  
Adam Hofman ◽  
Marek Dziubiński

The practical application of the model of water supply network realized in the program Epanet 2 requires the calibration of the model. The proposed simple calibration procedure, allows for taking into account the changes in resistance caused by the aging process, to be substituted by resistance coefficient K. In order to determine the substitute resistance coefficient K, the fire hydrant flow tests could be used, which allows to determine the aging for a given material. Calibration of the water supply network model is shown on the example of a small urban network in central Poland..


Author(s):  
Biruk A. Gebre ◽  
Kishore Pochiraju

Holonomic motion is desired for mobile ground robots and vehicles as it provides omnidirectional maneuvering capabilities, which can simplify the task of navigating around obstacles in confined spaces and unstructured environments. Mobility platforms that utilize spherical wheels are gaining popularity and interest due to the agile maneuvering and ground traversal capabilities they enable for mobility platforms. Ball-driven mobility platforms have a rich design space as various design parameters are available that can modify the physical and performance characteristics of the platforms. Various configurations for ball-driven mobility platforms are presented along with a generalized kinematic model that can be used for calculating motor velocities for a desired vehicle velocity. A naming convention is also presented in the paper for differentiating between configurations used for ball-driven mobility platforms. Metrics such as platform footprint, platform stability, and actuation force and efficiency are used to compare the configurations and to highlight some of the trade-offs associated with the selection of a configuration. Promising configurations are highlighted based on the metrics selected for the comparisons.


1994 ◽  
Vol 116 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Zak ◽  
R. G. Fenton ◽  
B. Benhabib

Most industrial robots cannot be off-line programmed to carry out a task accurately, unless their kinematic model is suitably corrected through a calibration procedure. However, proper calibration is an expensive and time-consuming procedure due to the highly accurate measurement equipment required and due to the significant amount of data that must be collected. To improve the efficiency of robot calibration, an optimization procedure is proposed in this paper. The objective of minimizing the cost of the calibration is combined with the objective of minimizing the residual error after calibration in one multiple-objective optimization. Prediction of the residual error for a given calibration process presents the main difficulty for implementing the optimization. It is proposed that the residual error is expressed as a polynomial function. This function is obtained as a result of fitting a response surface to either experimental or simulated sample estimates of the residual error. The optimization problem is then solved by identifying a reduced set of possible solutions, thus greatly simplifying the decision maker’s choice of an effective calibration procedure. An application example of this method is also included.


Robotica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (7) ◽  
pp. 994-1018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wael Saab ◽  
William S. Rone ◽  
Pinhas Ben-Tzvi

SUMMARYThis paper presents the design, analysis and experimentation of a Discrete Modular Serpentine Tail (DMST). The mechanism is envisioned for use as a robotic tail integrated onto mobile legged robots to provide a means, separate from the legs, to aid stabilization and maneuvering for both static and dynamic applications. The DMST is a modular two-degree-of-freedom (DOF) articulated, under-actuated mechanism, inspired by continuum and serpentine robotic structures. It is constructed from rigid links with cylindrical contoured grooves that act as pulleys to route and maintain equal displacements in antagonistic cable pairs that are connected to a multi-diameter pulley. Spatial tail curvatures are produced by adding a roll-DOF to rotate the bending plane of the planar tail curvatures. Kinematic and dynamic models of the cable-driven mechanism are developed to analyze the impact of trajectory and design parameters on the loading profiles transferred through the tail base. Experiments using a prototype are performed to validate the forward kinematic and dynamic models, determine the mechanism's accuracy and repeatability, and measure the mechanism's ability to generate inertial loading.


Author(s):  
E. R. Eiríksson ◽  
J. Wilm ◽  
D. B. Pedersen ◽  
H. Aanæs

Structured light systems are popular in part because they can be constructed from off-the-shelf low cost components. In this paper we quantitatively show how common design parameters affect precision and accuracy in such systems, supplying a much needed guide for practitioners. Our quantitative measure is the established VDI/VDE 2634 (Part 2) guideline using precision made calibration artifacts. Experiments are performed on our own structured light setup, consisting of two cameras and a projector. We place our focus on the influence of calibration design parameters, the calibration procedure and encoding strategy and present our findings. Finally, we compare our setup to a state of the art metrology grade commercial scanner. Our results show that comparable, and in some cases better, results can be obtained using the parameter settings determined in this study.


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