Sharif Digital Repository

From the creation of the first robots, researchers have been fascinated by the possibility of interaction between a robot and its environment, by the possibility of robots interacting with each other and with humans. The common, underlying assumption is that humans prefer to interact with machines in the same way that they interact with other people. In this work, an assistant robot is developed based on a commercial platform, known as Alice R-50 (with the Iranian name of Mina). Alice is designed specifically for human-robot social interaction and has been used widely for studies on developmental and social robotics. It is used to improve and encourage the development of communication and... 

In this thesis, kinematic, dynamic modeling and simulation, and control of SQ15-06N industrial robot have been presented. This robot is mostly used in the painting industry. Studying the robot requires familiarity with the robot programming and the hardware used in the robot. In this research, robot characteristics such as repeatability, load carrying capacity and accessibility have been investigated. The principles of industrial robot programming and robot programming language have been studied. The use of simulation software is common due to cost savings, reduced time, no need for robots and controllers, and the ability to test programs in a virtual environment. For this purpose, the... 

It is so essential to study a safe dynamics of agricultural mechanical equipment during duty stroke, plus getting a rich information about the nature of the soil under processing and in many cases there are associated simultaneous problems, so the main aim of this study is to create a safe working conditions for such specific equipment to extend their life time span as possible as it could. This study will predict an un-usual working circumstances for agricultural tools including plough of course depending on some automated technologies with fast response supported by smooth working conditions. Simply, the proposed Investigative system consists of a linear potentiometric element with... 

In the recent years, development of new technologies in the field of cognitive science has made a huge effect on the people social life style. Facial expression imitation with applications in the design of human robot interaction (HRI) systems is an active area of research. In this study, we propose an approach using a humanoid social robot, The Alice, for real-time imitation of human facial expression. The facial keypoints of the user are extracted by using the Kinect sensor together with manipulated SDK 2.0 codes. Kinect output array are collected for each expression, then the training dataset is created with these output arrays. An accurate Artificial neural network (ANN), which has a... 

Due to diversity in amputation possibilities, this thesis focuses on the specific case of ring finger amputation with some amount of stomp remaining. The goal is to design a robotic finger as a prosthetic, which its flexion and extension (position control) are instructed from an armband. The armband is equipped with 8 force sensors to detect volume variations in patient’s forearm. Its embedded microcontroller processes signals taken from these sensors, and using machine learning techniques (K-Nearest Regressor), decides on a specific angle for the finger. This angle value updates constantly, and using a flex sensor and a DC motor in finger, the desired flexion/extension is performed.... 

In this thesis, the purpose of the research was to develop a four-wheeled Mobile platform (Lower body) with three degrees of freedom for a humanoid robot upper body which is called RASA. RASA robot was designed and constructed for helping kids who have speech and hearing impairments. The objective was to develop a low-cost and affordable robot as compared to its international models to be used at home or school as a teacher assistant. RASA can help kids to learn signs as fast as possible due to the game-based and entertaining education system. The wheeled base platform consists of a new mechanism with 6 bar linkage for bending robot from the hip to about 60 degrees from a vertical position... 

During femur fracture reduction surgery, both patients and surgeons are exposed to a great amount of radiation, which is harmful to their health. Computer-assisted orthopaedic surgery (CAOS) is a less invasive approach for its ability to reduce the usage of image intensifiers. Various robots have been developed for femur fracture reduction surgery. Most of these robots are based on serial architectures. Both low load-carrying capacity and poor accuracy are inherent to serial robots, which makes them inappropriate for femur fracture reduction. Some parallel robots using the “Stewart platform” have also been developed for femur fracture reduction, but their restricted workspace limits their... 

In this research a robotic fish was designed and fabricated. For this propose different types of manufactured robotic fish were investigated and this model was developed and made with a one-piece flexible tail with an actuator that creates lateral movement through cable strings attached to the tail. Proposed mechanism has a simple, low cost structure that facilitates the control of the robotic fish movement. To control this robotic fish, a four-channel radio controller with 40 kHz frequency, was used. Swimming mode of this robotic fish is categorized in Subcarangiform swimming mode which is faster and has better maneuverability compared to its counterparts. It should be noted that the... 

Walking is one of the most important physical activities in daily life and it plays an important role on body health. Despite the importance of this issue, today many people suffering from walking abnormalities. This thesis aims at designing an exoskeleton for the rehabilitation in order to help patient’s lower limb movement. The hip joint is crucial for walking and is problematic for a large number of aged people or the patients who suffered from paralysis. A number of hip and knee model checked, one model for knee and one for hip selected to combine in order to achieve a unique model for walking exoskeleton. A mechanism consisting of six link and seven joints with four degrees of freedom... 

In recent years, industrial robots have been greatly used as orienting devices in industry, especially in the automotive, shipbuilding and aerospace manufacturing industries. Industrial robots are gradually finding their niche in manufacturing, replacing less universal and more expensive CNC-machines. Application area of robots is constantly growing; they begin to be used for the assembly, pick-and-place operations, machining operations and etc. The use of robots for machining operations is growing because of their flexibility to perform a broad spectrum of tasks at a lower cost when compared with machine tools. Recently, parallel robots have attracted more and more researchers’ attention in... 

In this thesis, a dynamic model of the biomimetic robotic fish with a flexible tail is developed. In this model, the oscillating frequency of the tail controls the forward velocity, and the body spline offset parameter controls the heading angle. The robotic fish were divided to two parts: a rigid body, and a flexible tail. The rigid body includes the head and the electrical and mechanical equipment. The bond graph model was developed and the numerical values were extracted from constructed robotic fish have also been hydrodynamically analyzed. Simulation results were quantitatively compared and verified with Matlab Simmechanics simulations. These simulations described the lateral movement... 

Trying both to understand the brain and to emulate some of its strengths has been one of the greatest human desires since ancient times. One of these amazing abilities is recognizing via vision. As a result, image recognition has been turned into one of the most attractive areas of research in Computer Vision field since recently. The challenging problem begins to rise where occlusion, scale, rotation and various light conditions contribute and manipulate the paradigm of image recognition. Although recognitions with these challenging problems are some of the capabilities that the brain has, but these are not all. One of the remarkable abilities of the brain is to recognize concepts through... 

A popular way for performing minimally invasive heart surgery is to use cardiac stabilizers that fix the heart during surgery. In the recent years several research works have been conducted to develop effective cardiac stabilizers. While these developments have attempted to improve fixation of the heart, there are reports indicating that a rigid cardiac stabilization may induce injury to heart muscle tissues due to restricting the heart motion in all directions. A more efficient approach than rigid cardiac stabilization might be to use a flexible cardiac stabilizer in combination with a surgical robot having motion compensation capability. The scope of this research is designing a device to... 

Recent studies show that spherical shape robots have been widely developed by many robotic researchers. A spherical shape can be also benefited in keeping mechanical components and electronic circuits inside a compact volume. The shell can also perform rolling motions for going fast and smooth on flat area. The reconfigurable spherical robot can be configured into a form of two interconnected hemispheres with three legs equipped with three Omni-directional wheels. The conceptual design of the robot will be initially packed and deployed in a spherical configuration. The spherical construction offers ease in transportation and deployment; for example, a number of these robots can be packed and... 

Control of line of sight (LOS) orientation is a fundamental prerequisite for virtually all dynamic applications in which an optical sensor is used to obtain images. In this research, a 3 DOF parallel mechanism is utilized to build a stable platform for high precision satellite photography. The platform may be designed based on the Stewart platform concept. The stability is obtained by controlling the roll, pitch and yaw of the mechanism. To apply linear control techniques and to use roll-pitch and yaw rates and also their absolute values, an active stable platform is designed. Line Of Sight (LOS) is a position vector from origin of a topocentric-horizontal system to the satellite of... 

Nowadays nearly 1% of the world population depends on wheelchairs for walking and movement. Due to harmful changes in human lifestyle, different diseases like stroke and problems in musculoskeletal system are increasing noticeably. Despite the fact that wheelchairs have recently been improved they have faced big problems like forcing people not to move and just sit for a long period of time. Wearable robots not only help these patients to rehabilitate their disabled organ and walk, but also have a significant mental effect on them.
The analysis of an exoskeletal orthosis designed for patients who have pain in one of their knees is presented. A mechanism for knee exoskeleton is analyzed... 

Long bone reduction is one the conventional but hard and time consuming process in orthopedic surgery. This difficulty becomes harder when it comes to lower limbs which are under large tensile forces by strong muscles surrounding. With considerable progress in technology development robotic surgery in recent years, using robotic systems for simplification, accuracy improvement and quality of long bone fracture surgery is considered. In this study a six degrees of freedom parallel mechanism is considered for femoral reduction. The purpose of this project is designing a master robot for moving the mentioned mechanism with considering hardware limitation of this mechanism. This limitations... 

Legged walking and climbing robots have recently achieved important results and developments, but they still need further improvements and study. The spider modeled as an eight-legged system. Legged robots have a body and a number of articulated legs which originate from the body and are put on the ground to hold robot’s weight or are swinging in the air to their new position. Each leg as a kinematic chain can be viewed as a manipulator that acts like a limb and contributes to the overall position and equilibrium of the structure. In order to evaluate and create an effective legged robot, the idea is to draw inspiration from nature. Spider robots present very good performances in terms of... 

In the present work, trajectory optimization of the Dual-Arm Cam-Lock robot considering kinematic and dynamic redundancy is performed. First, the optimal control problem is solved only considering kinematic redundancy and then is solved considering dynamic redundancy. General form of the dynamic model for the system is developed using Lagrangian relations. Global optimization method is used for redundancy resolution problem. A performance index is defined based on the consumed kinetic energy and is minimized through a desired trajectory using the global optimization method. Formulations of optimal control problem are derived and initial boundary problem is changed to two point boundary value...