A master-slave manipulator for excavation and construction tasks

doi:10.1016/0921-8890(89)90032-8

Robotics and Autonomous Systems

Volume 4, Issue 4, April 1989, Pages 333-337

https://doi.org/10.1016/0921-8890(89)90032-8 Get rights and content

Abstract

Currently used excavators and other construction machines use hydraulic actuators as the means of providing the necessary power to their effector tooling. The tools lack the flexibility of applying varying forces on an excavated object, thus preventing the use of powered equipment for the excavation and handling of buried sensitive objects. The prototype design of a master-slave force-feedback hydraulic manipulator described here will enable equipment operators to “feel” the force applied by the tool on a handled object as well as its location in space. This new tool may be provided as an optional feature on the traditional excavators, thus contributing to a greater flexibility of these machines and to the productivity enhancement of related work tasks.

References (5)

W. Whittaker
First Results in Automated Pipe Excavation
Komatsu Corp., Personal communication with, Tokyo, Japan (April...

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Cited by (31)

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A second case occurs when the MR and the SR have the same configuration but with different scales. In this case, after using a scale transformation on the desired trajectories, the control problem can be addressed as a classical tracking trajectory problem (Ostoja-Starzewski & Skibniewski, 1989). Finally, the third configuration happens when the MR and the SR structures are different.
This article solves the tracking trajectory problem of teleoperated robotic systems with different workspaces. The overall robotic system satisfies a regular master–slave structure with a delta-robot as the master device and a planar manipulator attached to a Cartesian robot with five degrees of freedom (DOFs) as the slave device. A forward kinematics analysis describes the workspace for the delta-robot and the five-DOFs manipulator. A coordinate transformation based on sigmoidal functions establishes the relation between the workspaces for both robotic devices. The obtained transformation yields a feasible workspace for the slave robot. Then, an inverse kinematics analysis provides the desired reference trajectories. The tracking trajectory control implements a robust strategy based on Barrier Lyapunov functions. The barrier controller does not allow the slave robot to reach non-attainable configurations. State-dependent gains characterized the obtained controller taking into account the different workspaces for each device. Numerical results describe the suggested controller applied in a virtual teleoperated robot and a real robotic system platform. The obtained results confirm the improvements (measured in terms of the mean square error and the $l_{2}$ norm of the applied controls) of the proposed controller against a traditional state feedback realization. Furthermore, the results show that the trajectories of the slave robot do not leave the valid workspace.
A methodology to quantitatively evaluate the safety of a glazing robot
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However, recent years have seen an increase in the development of construction robots and automated systems that can carry out complex sequences of operations with high performance. Examples of these construction robots include wall (façade)-climbing robots for inspection and maintenance, concrete power floating machines, concrete floor surface finishing robots, construction steel frame welding robots, wall panel bricklaying robots, robotic excavators, and automated cranes for the assembly of modular construction elements (Isao et al., 1996; Gambao et al., 2000 Ostoja-Starzewski and Skibniewski, 1989; Santos et al., 2003; Masatoshi et al., 1996; Bernold, 1987; Cusack, 1994; Poppy, 1994). The development of a construction robot and its application to a construction area cannot be achieved by system production alone.
A new construction method using robots is spreading widely among construction sites in order to overcome labour shortages and frequent construction accidents. Along with economical efficiency, safety is a very important factor for evaluating the use of construction robots in construction sites. However, the quantitative evaluation of safety is difficult compared with that of economical efficiency. In this study, we suggested a safety evaluation methodology by defining the ‘worker’ and ‘work conditions’ as two risk factors, defining the ‘worker’ factor as posture load and the ‘work conditions’ factor as the work environment and the risk exposure time. The posture load evaluation reflects the risk of musculoskeletal disorders which can be caused by work posture and the risk of accidents which can be caused by reduced concentration. We evaluated the risk factors that may cause various accidents such as falling, colliding, capsizing, and squeezing in work environments, and evaluated the operational risk by considering worker exposure time to risky work environments. With the results of the evaluations for each factor, we calculated the general operational risk and deduced the improvement ratio in operational safety by introducing a construction robot. To verify these results, we compared the safety of the existing human manual labour and the proposed robotic labour construction methods for manipulating large glass panels.
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This paper describes the development of an intuitive user interface for controlling a hydraulic backhoe, a piece of excavating equipment with a digging bucket on the end of a two-part articulated arm typically mounted on the back of a tractor or front-end loader. Controlling a backhoe requires a highly trained operator to control several hydraulic actuators simultaneously with fine inverse kinematic mapping. With this work, we propose a novel joystick configuration with hybrid cylindrical coordinate and independent bucket control, in which each joystick can execute horizontal and vertical movements of the backhoe. For this, a robotic controller scheme with a joystick rate control has been developed. The proposed method allows an operator to control the hydraulic backhoe intuitively and operate complex motions smoothly with no constraints. The suggested joystick scheme has several advantages compared to Cartesian coordinated control methods as follows; 1) independent horizontal and vertical motion control 2) more natural and intuitive for excavator works 3) less complicated and expensive 4) closer to conventional joystick operation mode and 5) easy return to standard mode by software. A virtual simulator and an actual backhoe test bed were developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed interface scheme. Preliminary user studies were performed for flattening and digging tasks using the virtual backhoe simulator interfaced to real joysticks. The results showed that the proposed intuitive interface facilitated faster and more precise operation than the conventional actuator control scheme. The controller was designed hierarchically to achieve the suggested joystick configuration control of the hydraulic backhoe system with electric joysticks. This included high-level control for rate control of the joystick, mid-level control for end-effector disturbance compensation, and low-level control for robust control of the hydraulic cylinders. The prototype backhoe with hydraulic control system had maximum position errors of 3 cm for vertical, horizontal, and slope movements with intuitive coordinate operations, making it more functional for performing various excavating tasks in natural and effective ways.
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We have developed an autonomous system for the retrieval of buried objects. It is designed to detect, locate and retrieve buried objects. The system is equipped with a surface and a subsurface sensor. The surface sensor is a laser rangefinder used to build the surface model. The subsurface sensor is a ground penetrating radar (GPR) used to detect and locate buried objects. We use an industrial robot equipped with an excavator bucket for automated excavation. Our system uses a “sense and dig cycle” procedure to retrieve buried objects. First, subsurface sensing is used to detect and locate the buried objects. If the object can be reached with one dig, the excavator retrieves it directly. Otherwise a layer of soil above the object is removed and another subsurface scan is made to get a more accurate estimate of the object location. This loop is repeated until the object is retrieved. The paper presents some recent results in sensing and excavation from experiments conducted on our testbed and the specific methods that we use to achieve those results. Such a system has numerous potential applications. They include hazardous waste removal, maintenance of subsurface structure (e.g. gas pipes), construction, and removal of unexploded buried ordnance.
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^a

Martin Ostoja-Starzewski holds an Engineer degree (1977) from the Technical University of Cracow, Poland, and Master (1980) and Ph.D. (1983) degrees from McGill University, Canada, all in mechanical engineering. Since 1985 he is an Assistant Professor in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University. Prior to joining Purdue he was a research associate at McGill and later a research consultant to the Government of Canada.

His work experience ranges from machine design (work on master-slave manipulators and cranes in Poland and Austria), flow-induced vibrations, mechanics of materials and wave propagation to geophysics. He has 10 refereed publications and 9 conference papers in these fields. His current research interests include the development of control systems for manipulators and their application in construction engineering.

^b

Miroslaw J. Skibniewski is currently an Assistant Professor in the Division of Construction Engineering and Management, School of Civil Engineering, at Purdue University. He received his M.E.C.E. (1981) degree from the Warsaw Technical University, Poland, as well as M.S.C.E. (1983) and Ph.D. (1986) degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University in the United States.

His research focuses on determining the feasibility of robotics application to construction tasks and on the design of automated construction systems. Other interests include engineering economics, construction engineering systems analysis and optimization, ergonomics, operations research, and expert systems. Dr. Skibniewski is author or co-author of a number of publications, which include a chapter entitled ‘Robots in Construction’ in the “International Encyclopedia of Robotics” published by John Wiley & Sons in 1988, and the book “Robotics in Civil Engineering” published by Computational Mechanics Publications and Van Nostrand Reinhold, also in 1988.

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Robotics in the factory of the futureA master-slave manipulator for excavation and construction tasks

Abstract

First Results in Automated Pipe Excavation

Robotics in the factory of the future
A master-slave manipulator for excavation and construction tasks