Traditionally, robots were mainly used in industrial environments, where precise positioning and specific monitoring were the main objectives. This led to the design of rigid terminal effectors, confined to operate in structured environments and beyond the workspaces of human operators. More recently, the research community is pushing towards the design of compliant and anthropomorphic terminal effectors, which have demonstrated the ability to allow easy and safe interaction of robots with unknown and unstructured environments.
This new framework, which encompasses the design, planning and control of gentle final effects, is delivered with several theoretical and practical problems which must be resolved. Indeed, recently, the research community has been enormous to develop new theoretical and technological solutions to allow robots to operate between humans and with humans, and to move safely and interact with unknown and not structured environments .
However, the question of how to use integrated compliance to improve interaction with the environment and multiply the degrees of freedom is an open problem.
Indeed, a valid formalization could be to use optimization approaches based on models. Others, instead, offer the use of learning techniques to generalize from acquired data. Finally, very promising is understanding of how humans solve the problem at the musculoskeletal level, with the ultimate goal of producing a limited but effective replication of human-inspired solutions.
The objective of this research subject is to provide the possibility of sharing current progress on the problem of planning and control of soft and hybrid terminal effectors. Manuscripts must be provided in the form of original research, journals or perspective documents. Subjects of interest include, without limiting themselves:
• Control of compliant final effects
• Movement planning of compliant final effects
• Perception through compliant final effects
• Impedance planning
• Manipulation
• Modeling and control of variable compliance devices
• Biological inspiration models and controls for softness and hybrid
rigorous robots
• Flexible robotics applications
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Dr. Roa has been working part-time since 2015 for Roboception, a DLR spin-off working on 3D perception solutions for robotics, as an expert in senior robotics. There, he manages Roboception research projects, in particular on applications in robotic manipulation and navigation. All other subjects of subjects do not declare any competing interest.
Keywords: Manipulation, impedance planning, final effects, biologically inspired robots, robots control, robots perception
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