University of Edinburgh

Space and nuclear robots are exposed to significant amounts of radiation which can lead to errors and system-crippling failures with great losses in economy.

The limited human intervention for safe operation necessitates the need for a remotely connected haptic feedback system to aid human-robot interactions.

In the next decade, distributed sensor network systems made of insect-scale flying sensors will enable a step change in monitoring natural disasters and remote areas. They will contribute to protecting the environment by providing data on the contamination of physical and biological systems and on the impact of human activities. To date, a key limitation of this technology is that small drones such as the robobee can remain airborne only for few tens of minutes.

The vast majority of applications of robots do not involve just one isolated task (such as grasping an object) but instead carefully choregraphed sequences of such tasks, with dependencies between tasks not just in terms of what comes after what but also how the previous task should be performed (in a quantitative sense at the level of motor control) in order to set up for the next. Moreover, there are numerous subjective variables in these tasks, e.g., how close should it come to a delicate object or how hard should it pull on a cable?

Background

A large variety of robotic applications strongly involve handling various objects as the core process for task completion. To date, most of these jobs are still performed by people. Although some are automated by robots, those solutions primarily rely on pre-designed rules or tele-operation (limited operational time due to cognitive overload), which unavoidably limits the performance in changing environments. This project consists of multiple challenging research topics in robotic manipulation.

Project description

Background