Designing an urban reconnaissance robot is highly challenging work given the nature of the terrain in which these robots are required to operate. In this work, we attempt to extend the locomotion capabilities of these robots beyond what is currently feasible. The design and unique features of our bio-inspired reconfigurable robot, called Scorpio, with rolling, crawling, and wall-climbing locomotion abilities are presented in this paper. The design of the Scorpio platform is inspired by Cebrennus rechenbergi, a rare spider species that has rolling, crawling and wall-climbing locomotion attributes. This work also presents the kinematic and dynamic model of Scorpio. The mechanical design and system architecture are introduced in detail, followed by a detailed description on the locomotion modes. The conducted experiments validated the proposed approach and the ability of the Scorpio platform to synthesise crawling, rolling and wall-climbing behaviours. Future work is envisioned for using these robots as active, unattended, mobile ground sensors in urban reconnaissance missions. The accompanying video demonstrates the shape shifting locomotion capabilities of the Scorpio robot.

As robots begin to perform jobs autonomously, with minimal or no human intervention, a new challenge arises: robots also need to autonomously detect errors and recover from faults. In this paper, we present a Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based fault diagnosis system for a bio-inspired reconfigurable robot named Scorpio. The diagnosis system needs to detect and classify faults while Scorpio uses its crawling and rolling locomotion modes. Specifically, we classify between faulty and non-faulty conditions by analyzing onboard Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensor data. The data capture nine different locomotion gaits, which include rolling and crawling modes, at three different speeds. Statistical methods are applied to extract features and to reduce the dimensionality of original IMU sensor data features. These statistical features were given as inputs for training and testing. Additionally, the c-Support Vector Classification (c-SVC) and nu-SVC models of SVM, and their fault classification accuracies, were compared. The results show that the proposed SVM approach can be used to autonomously diagnose locomotion gait faults while the reconfigurable robot is in operation.

Façade cleaning in high-rise buildings has always been considered a hazardous task when carried out by labor forces. Even though numerous studies have focused on the development of glass façade cleaning systems, the available technologies in this domain are limited and their performances are broadly affected by the frames that connect the glass panels. These frames generally act as a barrier for the glass façade cleaning robots to cross over from one glass panel to another, which leads to a performance degradation in terms of area coverage. We present a new class of façade cleaning robot with a biped mechanism that is able overcome these obstacles to maximize its area coverage. The developed robot uses active suction cups to adhere to glass walls and adopts mechanical linkage to navigate the glass surface to perform cleaning. This research addresses the design challenges in realizing the developed robot. Its control system consists of inverse kinematics, a fifth polynomial interpolation, and sequential control. Experiments were conducted in a real scenario, and the results indicate that the developed robot achieves significantly higher coverage performance by overcoming both negative and positive obstacles in a glass panel.

This paper presents a robot design competition called ‘IDC Robocon’ as an effective tool for engineering education. The International Design Contest (IDC) Robocon competition has several benefits in creating a meaningful design experience for undergraduate engineering students and includes an international flavour as participants of the competition hail from all around the world. The problem posed to the contestants is to design, build and test mobile robots that are capable of accomplishing a task. A primary goal of the competition is to provide undergraduates with a meaningful design experience with an emphasis on mechanical design, electronic circuits and programming. It is hoped that by placing the emphasis on the design, the course will encourage more undergraduates to go into the field of engineering design. This paper presents the latest 2015 IDC Robocon (the 26th edition) in detail and discusses course of events and results in terms of the educational experience. In this competition, a simulated space problem of cleaning the debris from orbit is proposed for the latest IDC Robocon competition. Teams, comprising of students from multiple countries work together to develop robotic systems to compete with each other in collecting the foam balls and delivering them to the rotating the holder.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate a generalized singularity analysis of a snake-like robot. The generalized analysis is denoted as analysis of singularity of a model which defines all designable parameters such as the link length and/or the position of the passive wheel as arbitrary variables. The denotation is a key point for a novelty of this study. This paper addresses the above new model denotation, while previous studies have defined the designable parameters as unique one. This difference makes the singularity analysis difficult substantively. To overcome this issue, an analysis method using redundancy of the snake-like robot is proposed. The proposed method contributes to simplify singularity analysis concerned with the designable parameters. The singular configurations of both the model including side-slipping and the one with non side-slipping are analyzed. As the results of the analysis, we show two contributions. The first contribution is that a singular configuration depends on designable parameters such as link length as well as state values such as relative angles. The second contribution is that the singular configuration is characterized by the axials of the passive wheels of all non side-slipping link. This paper proves that the singular configuration is identified as following two conditions even if the designable parameters are chosen as different variables and the model includes side-slipping link. One is that the axials of passive wheels of all non side-slipping links intersect at a common point. Another one is that axials of passive wheels of all non side-slipping links are parallel.

This paper presents a variable structure control design method for linear and nonlinear continuous-time systems with a special type of sliding sector using a new equivalent sector control. The PR-sliding sector is the subset of state space in which the derivative of the square P-norm of the state, $\parallel x{\parallel }_P^2$, is less than or equal to the negative value of the quadratic form of the state $x^{T}Rx$ with a positive semi-definite matrix $R=C^{T}C$ where $(A,C)$ is observable. The previous sliding sector control transfered the state to the inside of the sector using the equivalent control derived from the sliding surface in the sliding sector when the state is in the outside of the sector. Discontinuous chattering movement of the state was observed inside the boundary of the sector under the aforementioned control. This paper presents a new variable structure control design method with the special type of sliding sector. The control is said the sliding sector control using the new equivalent sector control. The new equivalent sector control provides the derivative of $\parallel x{\parallel }_P^2$ plus $x^{T}Rx$, i.e. $v=s^2\left(x\right)-{\delta }^2\left(x\right)$, being negative. The design method of $s\left(x\right)$ and $\delta \left(x\right)$ is proposed for the general linear single input system by using the Riccati equation where P is the solution of the equation. Under the proposed equivalent sector control, the state trajectory may jump at the particular uncontrollable states when $\mathrm{\partial }\dot{\phantom{a}}v/\mathrm{\partial }u=0$, and the equivalent sector control is set zero. If v becomes positive, the state is outside of the sector, and then the state shall be transfered to the inside of the sector by the discontinuous nonlinear control input. The sliding sector control proposed is applied to a type of nonlinear systems like a simple pendulum. Numerical simulations show that the proposed method gives satisfactory results.