Sharif Digital Repository

This paper presents the design process and construction of a mobile social robot companion "Arash" for educational and therapeutic intervention for children with chronic diseases; one which is based on their interests and needs. This study concentrates on children with cancer who suffer from physical pain caused by both the disease and its treatment. Moreover, cancer treatment causes emotional distress, which can reduce the efficiency of medications. Using social robots to interact with ill children in a hospital environment could decrease their distress, thereby improving the efficiency of the treatment. Arash is a 15 degrees-of-freedom cost effective humanoid mobile robot companion,... 

In recent years, robotic rehabilitation has been utilized in treatment and recovery of patients with disabilities. In this paper, a novel design and kinematic analysis of a 4-DOF robot for upper-limb rehabilitation are proposed. The main novelty of this design is its mechanism for wrist and fingers motions which is added to the shoulder and elbow mechanism without any noticeable weight increase in the moving parts of the robot. For this purpose, a cable driven mechanism is implemented at the robot end-effector to move the wrist and fingers parts, and the corresponding actuators are placed at the base of the robot. © 2018 IEEE  

This paper presents the design characteristics of a new robot Assistant for Social Aims (RASA), being an upper-torso humanoid robot platform currently under final stages of development. This project addresses the need for developing affordable humanoid platforms designed to be utilized in new areas of social robotics research, primarily teaching Persian Sign Language (PSL) to children with hearing disabilities. RASA is characterized by three features which are hard to find at the same time in today’s humanoid robots: its dexterous hand-arm systems enabling it to perform sign language, low development cost, and easy maintenance. In this paper, design procedures and considerations are briefly... 

Morphological computation (MC) has revolutionized robotic systems employing morphological properties (MP). Thus far, morphology has been mostly used to analyze morphological functionalities qualitatively after design phase of robotic systems. Furthermore, morphology has verified qualitative requirements, not modeled quantitative specifications. To fill this gap, we present a distributed algorithm to monitor module reconfiguration for homogeneous self-reconfigurable robots (HSRs) considering the size of modules. In this method, neighboring modules of a particular module occupy a spatial region called adjacency configuration (AC), whose size depends on the module size; then, we monitor... 

This article presents the thorough design procedure, specifications, and performance of a mobile social robot friend Arash for educational and therapeutic involvement of children with cancer based on their interests and needs. Our research focuses on employing Arash in a pediatric hospital environment to entertain, assist, and educate children with cancer who suffer from physical pain caused by both the disease and its treatment process. Since cancer treatment causes emotional distress, which can reduce the efficiency of medications, using social robots to interact with children with cancer in a hospital environment could decrease this distress, thereby improving the effectiveness of their... 

Cable-driven parallel robots have several outstanding characteristics that make them unique in many robotic applications. Since cables can only pull, one of the most important issues associated with these robots is obtaining their workspace. In this paper a spatial translational cable-driven robot with active/passive cables is considered and its workspace is investigated from several points of views. First the moment resisting capability of the robot is discussed and the effects of some robot's parameters on the workspace are studied. Then, both force-feasibility and moment-resisting capability of the robot are considered to find the region where the end-effector may exert the required... 

Kinematic accuracy of the robot end-effector is decreased by many uncertainties. In order to design and manufacture robots with high accuracy, it is essential to know the effects of these uncertainties on the motion of robots. Uncertainty analysis is a useful method which can estimate deviations from desired path in robots caused by uncertainties. This paper presents an applied formulation based on Direct Linearization Method (DLM), for 3D statistical uncertainty analysis of open- loop mechanisms and robots. The maximum normal and parallel components of the position error on the end-effector path are introduced. In this paper, uncertainty effects of both linear and angular variations in... 

In this paper, a mobile manipulator is developed and studied in order to manipulate the complicated objects and navigate in an indoor environment. The arm consists of an actuator that makes the first linkage to move in two degrees of freedom in the first step of the task. In the next mode of the task, another actuator causes the second linkage to move in the third degree of freedom. In addition, the arm contains a gripper that grabs a variety of objects such as a screw. Therefore, the robotic arm can manipulate objects, and the mobile robot connected to the arm can detect, classify and track targets in its surrounding. Results carried out that the manufactured robot is able to manipulate and...