A method is presented for slip analysis of a wheeled mobile manipulator. The said system consists of an industrial manipulator mounted on a mobile platform performing aircraft manufacturing tasks. Unlike tracked/legged mobile robots that may slip when negotiating slopes or climbing stairs, a wheeled mobile manipulator may slip resulting from the manipulator movement or the forces from the end-effector during fastening. Slip analysis is crucial to ensure pose accuracy for operation. In this study, first a universal friction constraint is used to derive the slip condition of the system. Three cases are considered, with the first case considering the reaction force in relation to the stand-off distance between the mobile manipulator and the workpiece. The second case deals with the joint speeds to investigate the effect of coupling terms including centrifugal forces and gyroscopic moments on slip. The third case deals with the joint accelerations to investigate the effect of inertia forces and moments on slip. Simulations and experiments are carried out to verify the proposed method.

The key to the suppression of vibration and noise for PMSM is the optimization of electromagnetic excitation force. The method of motor body optimization can effectively reduce the radial excitation force of the motor, so as to suppress the vibration and noise of the motor. Firstly, the stator structure of the motor is optimized with V-shape skew slot based on the analytical modeling of the radial electromagnetic excitation force of the motor. Then, the structural parameters of the motor that affect the electromagnetic excitation force of the motor are determined, and the average torque, torque ripple and radial electromagnetic excitation force generated by tangential electromagnetic excitation force are taken as the optimization objectives. The sensitivity analysis and classification of the structural parameters of the motor are carried out. The multi-objective genetic algorithm and response surface method are combined to optimize the structural parameters of the motor. Finally, the finite element analysis, modal analysis, multi-speed vibration and noise analysis of the optimized motor are done. The performance comparisons before and after optimization have proved that the peak of equivalent sound power level have decreased by 8.65% after the optimization of V-shaped skewed slot structure. After the optimization of structural parameters, the power level of permanent magnet synchronous motor has been reduced by 9.22%. For the vibration noise caused by resonance and the main frequency of vibration noise harmonics, the suppression effects are also better than those of V-shape skewed slots optimization, and the ERPL values are reduced by 9.22% and 10.12%, respectively, in two cases. The results show that the vibration and noise of permanent magnet synchronous motor are effectively suppressed.

Aiming at the low-cost, wide-range, and accurate measurement requirement for Microelectromechanical System (MEMS) Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) on a multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), the paper designs a heterogeneous parallel redundancy configuration scheme. In redundant MEMS IMUs, a high-cost and small-range MEMS gyroscope is combined with low-cost and large-range MEMS gyroscopes. Then, an adaptive data fusion method of redundant MEMS gyroscopes is proposed. By the designed experiments based on the simulation data and the sensor measurement data, the proposed method has been proved that it can effectively improve the angular rate measurement performance of the multi-rotor UAV and broaden the angular rate measurement range on the basis of saving the configuration cost and volume of the micro IMU.

The position and orientation of a mobile agent, such as robot or drone, etc., should be estimated in a timely way during operation in the structured indoor environment, so as to ensure the security and efficiency of task execution. Concerning the problem that the position and orientation are often estimated separately by different kinds of sensors in the off-the-shelf methods, we design a novel position orientation sensor (POS). The POS consists of four pairs of linear charge-coupled devices (CCDs) and cylindrical lenses, which can estimate the 3D coordinate of the anchor in the POS’s field of view. After detecting at least three anchors in its field of vision sequentially, the Rodrigues coordinate transformation algorithm is utilized to estimate the position and orientation of POS simultaneously. Meanwhile, the position and orientation are estimated at the receiver side. Hence there is no privacy concern associated with this system. The architecture of the proposed POS is symmetrical and redundant, even if one of the linear CCDs or cylindrical lens malfunctions, the whole system could still work normally. The proposed method is cost-effective and easily extends to a wide range. The numerical simulation demonstrates the feasibility and high accuracy of the proposed method, and it outperforms the off-the-shelf methods.

In this paper, we propose an improved torque sensorless speed control method for electric assisted bicycle, this method considers the coordinate conversion. A low-pass filter is designed in disturbance observer to estimate and compensate the variable disturbance during cycling. A DC motor provides assisted power driving, the assistance method is based on the real-time wheel angular velocity and coordinate system transformation. The effect of observer is proved, and the proposed method guarantees stability under disturbances. It is also compared to the existing methods and their performances are illustrated through simulations. The proposed method improves the performance both in rapidity and stability.

The paper proposes an angular velocity fusion method of the microelectromechanical system inertial measurement unit array based on the extended Kalman filter with correlated system noises. In the proposed method, an adaptive model of the angular velocity is built according to the motion characteristics of the vehicles and it is regarded as the state equation to estimate the angular velocity. The signal model of gyroscopes and accelerometers in the microelectromechanical system inertial measurement unit array is used as the measurement equation to fuse and estimate the angular velocity. Due to the correlation of the state and measurement noises in the presented fusion model, the traditional extended Kalman filter equations are optimized, so as to accurately and reliably estimate the angular velocity. By simulating angular rates in different motion modes, such as constant and change-in-time angular rates, it is verified that the proposed method can reliably estimate angular rates, even when the angular rate has been out of the microelectromechanical system gyroscope measurement range. And results show that, compared with the traditional angular rate fusion method of microelectromechanical system inertial measurement unit array, it can estimate angular rates more accurately. Moreover, in the kinematic vehicle experiments, the performance advantage of the proposed method is also verified and the angular rate estimation accuracy can be increased by about 1.5 times compared to the traditional method.