Master-Slave Control Method with Force Feedback for Grasping Soft Objects using a Teleoperation Construction Robot

A master-slave control method based on the identifications of load force and impedance for Tele-operated hydraulic construction robot system is presented in this paper. The robot system is composed of a hydraulic excavator and two joysticks. The hydraulic excavator is served as the construction robot. The joysticks are used for operating the robot in a remote region. The master actuator and the slave actuator in this system are the joystick-gear of a joystick and the fork-glove actuator of the excavator respectively. The load force and impedance identifiers are used for identifying the load force and impedance of the slave actuator respectively. According to the load force, the master controller controls the master actuator to generate the reaction force for operator. On the basis of the load impedance and the master slave error, the slave controller controls the slave actuator to perform a working task. The experimental researches confirmed that the operator not only obtains the force sense of the object accurately, but also obtains the deformation and stiffness senses of the object obviously.

There is much evidence to indicate a shortage of Registered Nurses (RNs) in Australia and to suggest that the shortage may be more pronounced in rural and remote locations. Attracting RNs to work in rural and remote areas may not be as simple as increasing the intake of students into university undergraduate pre-registration nursing courses. There is some evidence indicating that student nurses may be more likely to enter the nursing workforce in rural and remote locations if they have existing associations with rural and remote areas and/or their undergraduate education provides opportunities to undertake supported placements in rural and remote settings. Two important difficulties have been associated with measuring outcomes in relation to rural and remote pre-registration nursing students. One is defining what constitutes a rural or remote location and the other is suspect data on the number of nursing students enrolled in, and completing, nursing courses. The aims of this study were to provide a longitudinal profile of the number of domestic students studying and completing undergraduate pre-registration nursing courses in Australia, with a particular emphasis on identifying those at rural and remote university campuses, and to compare results across States and Territories. This study presents the combined findings from two investigative reports. Data on undergraduate pre-registration nursing student numbers were collected via electronic survey instruments completed by staff at all Australian educational institutions offering undergraduate pre-registration nursing education programs in 2001 and 2002. Australian domestic students were the focus of this study. Data included the total number of domestic students enrolled in undergraduate pre-registration nursing courses in 2001 and 2002, the number of domestic students who successfully completed courses in 1999, 2000 and 2001, and estimates for the number expected to complete in 2002. Surveys were sent to course coordinators or other staff nominated by heads of divisions of nursing at each institution. There was a 100% response rate. Twenty-four rural and remote campus locations were identified using an adjusted form of the Rural, Remote and Metropolitan Areas (RRMA) classification system. The Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory did not have any rural or remote campus locations. In contrast, undergraduate pre-registration nursing in Tasmania was offered at a rural campus only (for the first 2 years). From 2001 to 2002, there was an increase of just over 5% in the total number of domestic students enrolled in undergraduate pre-registration nursing courses in Australia (2002 total = 22,811 students). Rural and remote location students accounted for slightly more than 25% of these students in 2001, and almost 27% in 2002. The States Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland had the highest percentage of students enrolled at rural and remote campus locations, greater than the Australian average for both years. In contrast, South Australia and Western Australia had less than 11% of students enrolled at rural and remote campus locations for each year. Total undergraduate pre-registration course completions increased by approximately 16% across Australia between 1999 (n = 4868) and 2002 (n = 5667), although for 2002, the figure was projected. Of these total course completions, the percentage of students completing at rural and remote campus locations increased from almost 23% to nearly 28% during the same period. Of the States/Territories with both metropolitan and rural/remote campus locations, only Victoria and Queensland had more than 25% of their total student completions consisting of students enrolled at rural and remote campus locations for each year. In contrast, South Australia and Western Australia had approximately 6% of student completions consisting of students enrolled at rural and remote campus locations in 1999, increasing to approximately 12% projected for 2002. In this study, the authors attempted to improve the accuracy of data collection in relation to the number of domestic undergraduate pre-registration nursing students in Australia, which is representative of the potentially new Australian domestic RN workforce. There was a trend towards an increasing number of students being enrolled in undergraduate pre-registration nursing courses, and also toward an increasing number of course completions. From the perspective of the rural and remote RN workforce, the percentage of students enrolled and completing courses at rural and remote campus locations was found to be increasing. However, there may be some areas of concern for education and workforce planners in States and Territories that are providing a smaller percentage of their undergraduate pre-registration nursing courses in rural and remote areas. Several study limitations are discussed and suggestions made for future research.

The control system of a free-flying space manipulation robot with force-torque sensing is considered. As part of this work, a control circuit of the remote control system of a free-flying robot with variable delays in the data channel is proposed. The passivation method for TDPA (Time Domain Passivity Approach) communication cannel has been used to ensure the stability of the control system. The TDPA method is a flexible and convenient approach to ensure the passivity of the space manipulation robot's remote control system, but as a usage effect a drift of the position of the processing device happens. The method of compensating the drift of the executive device was applied to eliminate this drawback. To test the proposed control algorithms, a "virtual" stand was created and a simulation of a remote control system of a free-flying space manipulation robot with force-torque sensing was done under variable delays.

Hydraulic excavators are the representative of field robot and has been used in various fields of construction. Since the excavator operates in the hazardous working circumstance, operators of excavator exposed in harmful environment. Therefore, automation and remote control system have been investigated to protect from the hazardous working environment. In this paper, a hydraulic simulation program and a remote control system were developed based on 1.5 ton excavator which is a kind of field robot. The simulator was made by the AMESim, hydraulic modeling environment. And the method to construct the remote control system is proposed. The remote control system is consisted of a manual and automatic mode. Manual mode controls a hydraulic cylinder as open loop control and auto mode controls the end-effecter of excavator using tracking control system. The efficiency of remote control system was evaluated through the field test.

There are two motors used in the studied ocean winch, a reel motor and a lead screw motor. This paper focuses on the synchronization control of the two motors. Firstly, the mathematical model of the winch hydraulic transmission system is established, and the approximate relation between the model parameters and the cable storage state is deduced by using interpolation method. Then, combined with the variation rule of the model parameters, an adaptive IMC-PI(internal model control proportional-integral) regulator is designed to control the speed of the reel motor. The parameters of the adaptive IMC-PI regulator are adjusted according to the cable storage state on the reel. The characteristics of master-slave control and cross-coupling control are analyzed, and a new master-slave cross-coupling control method applicable for dual-motor synchronization control is proposed. The new method is realized on the basis of master-slave control. In the dual-motor master-slave cross-coupling synchronization control system, the synchronization angle error is fed back to the master motor control loop, so that the system has perfect synchronization control performance during start-up and running under disturbance. Finally, the validities of the proposed methods are verified by several simulation results.

The drive system of shearer traction unit is affected by complex load interference and system structure, which results in the problem of unbalanced power of dual-motor of shearer traction unit. A new type of dual-motor frequency conversion control system for shearer traction unit with “common rectification and dual inverters” is designed. And a dual-motor power balance control method based on particle swarm optimization torque cross-coupled control is proposed. The new frequency conversion control system adopts a parallel structure of two inverter circuits with a common DC bus. Particle swarm optimization is used to optimize the PID control parameters of torque cross-coupling control, which solves the problem that it is difficult to gain optimal PID parameters. The control model is established using Matlab/Simulink simulation software. The proposed control method and the master-slave control method are compared by simulation. The results show that the control effect of proposed control method is better synchromization and power balance effect than the master-slave control method. The proposed control method is applied to dual-motor control of shearer traction unit for experimental verification. The results indicate that the proposed power balance control method realizes that the output torque ratio of dual-motor is between 0.9 and 1.1.

This paper presents a robotic catheter system with force sensors, monitor and a master-slave remote control system. We developed micro force sensors and applied them in the system to guarantee the operation safety in intravascular neurosurgery applications, and employed a camera to monitor the operation. Two kinds of force information are obtained through force sensors when the catheter contacted the blood vessel. The experiment shows that the proposed force sensors-based catheter system works well through force feedback and remote control. The system can facilitates the operation and avoid potential damages.

This paper looks at the different architectures and technologies used to build systems for remote control of electricity consumption. The advantages and disadvantages of different technologies are presented. Remote energy monitoring systems will be an integral part of future smart grids. In this regard, the paper discusses the benefits that remote monitoring systems can offer to both electricity suppliers and consumers. In addition, future solutions using remote systems that will save and use electricity and its energy sources are considered. The report presents the structure and functionality of an embedded remote metering system in Bulgaria. Finally, proposals are made to maximize the benefits of building remote monitoring systems and smart meters.

In this paper the control system of the pellet injector is introduced in detail and the system mainly includes two parts: The present and the remote control system. The present control system controls the injector and provides the interface to the remote system. And the remote control system has acquired present signals with analog input card and perform the actions through digit output card, it also has an interface for Windows programming easily used by the operators when carrying out the pellet injection experiments. Through several HT-7 campaigns, the remote control system has been validated to be feasible and reliable and has made successful shots for studying the interactions between the pellets and plasma.

In recent years, control system reliability has received much attention with increase of situations where computer-controlled systems such as robot control systems are used. In order to improve reliability, control systems need to have abilities to detect a fault (fault detection) and to maintain stability and control performance (fault tolerance). In this paper, we address the vibration suppression control of a one-link flexible arm robot. Vibration suppression is realized by an additional feedback of a strain gauge sensor attached to the arm besides motor position. However, a sensor fault (e.g., disconnection) may degrade the control performance and make the control system unstable at its worst. In this paper, we propose a fault tolerant control system for strain gauge sensor fault. The proposed control system has a strain gauge sensor signal observer based on the reaction force observer and detects the fault by monitoring the estimation error. After fault detection, the proposed control system exchanges the faulty sensor signal for the estimated one and switches to a fault mode controller so as to maintain the stability and the control performance. We apply the proposed control system to the vibration suppression control system of a one-link flexible arm robot and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed control system by some experiments.

An Attempt for Measuring Snowboarding Performance Using Compact Force Sensors

Computer Assisted Remote Control and Automation Systems for Longwall Shearers

Physical testing of large-scale ship models at sea is a new experimental method. It is a cheap and reliable way to research the environment adaptability of a ship in complex and extreme wave conditions. It is necessary to have a stable experimental system for the test. Since the experimental area is large, a remote control system and a telemetry system are essential, and were designed by the authors. An experiment was conducted on the Songhuajiang River to test the systems. The relationship between the model’s speed and its electromotor’s revolutions was also measured during the model test. The results showed that the two systems make it possible to carry out large-scale model tests at sea.

Armed at solving the problems appeared in researching remote control system of the bomb-disposed robot, a five-DOF manipulator and two directions of the freedom are produced, and the manipulator joint angle of the geometric method is given which avoided finding the solution of inverse process of the kinematics. Have applied the RTW code to generate a software, built the target system of xPC Target, used data transfer station, realized parallel working between master control PC machine and embedded computer PC104, structured bomb-disposed robot servo control system at a distance. The scheme is feasible demonstrated by experiments that include landscape orientation snatching, portrait snatching, fluctuation snatching and so on.

The manufacture, maintenance and inspection of a ship involve a series of works on the ship shell plate, which were always seen as harmful for human operators and time-consuming work. The shipping industry is looking to replace manual work with automation equipment. A magnetic climbing robot that can omnidirectionally move on ship shell plate was presented in this paper. This article summarized the mechanical structure, control system, kinematic model, and autonomy of robot. The mechanical structure of the robot was inspired by bionics and adopted a wheel-leg hybrid locomotion system. In the control system of this robot, industrial control computer (IPC) was adopted as the core controller and brushless direct current servomotor was chosen as the actuating station. Finally, the motion analysis of the designed robot was performed. The results of the analysis show that the magnetic climbing robot adapted to the ship curved shell plate and crossed obstacles.