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Networked Telerobotics: Systems, Collaborative Algorithms
- Demonstrate Demonstrate,
commissioned by the Whitney Museum, set up a state-of-the-art
robotic webcamera over UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, birthplace
of the Free Speech Movement. For six weeks, the camera was accessible
to anyone on the Internet. Online participants shared remote
control of the camera, allowing them to zoom in to frame and
photograph activity in the Plaza at any time of day or night.
- Sharecam We
are developing network-based applications for education, journalism
and entertainment where many users share control of a single
physical resource. Our project, "Sharecam", is a single robotic
pan, tilt, zoom digital camera. In this paper we describe algorithms
for controlling the camera frame based on independent requests
from online users.
- Tele-Actor Internet-based "online
robots" now provide public access to remote locations such as
museums and laboratories. The Tele-Actor is a collaborative online
teleoperation system for distance learning that allows many students
to simultaneously share control of a single mobile resource.
- Collaborative
Control Collaborative Telerobotics (CT) is a novel approach
to teleimmersion and teleworking. With CT, participants collaborate
rather than compete for access to valuable resources such as
historical and scientific sites. Collaboration is a crucial
ingredient for education and teamwork. A scalable infrastructure
for CT, compatible with the Internet, would allow large groups
of students or researchers to simultaneously participate in
remote experiences.
- Ouija
2000: Collaborative Teleoperation on the Internet We
have created a system that allows a distributed group of users
to simultaneously teleoperate an industrial robot arm via the
Internet. A java applet at each client streams mouse motion
vectors from up to 30 users; a server aggregates these inputs
to produce a single control stream for the robot. Users receive
visual feedback from a digital camera mounted above the robot
arm.
- The Telegarden:
An Interactive Installation on the WWW The TeleGarden
is an art installation that allows web users to view and interact
with a remote garden filled with living plants. Members can
plant, water, and monitor the progress of seedlings via the
tender movements of an industrial robot arm.
- Memento
Mori Mori displays streaming seismographic data measured
continuously from a site near the Hayward Fault above University
of California at Berkeley. The earthquake detector is a Streckeisen
STS-1 seismometer that measures vertical ground velocity. Data
is collected by the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory and relayed
to a server in the Alpha Lab.
- Shadow
Server Dislocation of Intimacy is a net-based installation
by Ken Goldberg, Bob Farzin, and the Alpha Lab. The installation
is based on a sealed black box who's interior is accessible
only via the Internet. The user selects from among five lights,
clicks the button, and receives a surrealist and mysterious
shadow, which arrives at the user's screen in gray-scale and
without content.
- Eigentaste
Eigentaste is a collaborative filtering algorithm that uses universal
queries to elicit real-valued user ratings on a common set of items
and applies principal component analysis (PCA) to the resulting dense
subset of the ratings matrix. PCA facilitates dimensionality reduction
for offline clustering of users and rapid computation of recommendations.
Eigentaste was originally used in an online joke recommendation system
called Jester, which recommends new jokes to users based on their ratings
of an initial set. We are currently working on implementing a new application,
Donation Dashboard, which recommends a portfolio of non-profits (including
suggested donation dollar amounts for each).
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Algorithmic Automation: Part Feeding, Fixturing
- Evaluating the Blade Primitive for Feeding Polygonal Parts with Vibratory Bowls: Simulation, Hardware, and Experiments
This project involves the design of a test track, completion of quantitative physical experiments, development of theories to explain discrepancies between the blade algorithm and the experiments, and the exploration of software simulation.
- D-Space
and Deform Closure We extend the form closure framework
for rigid parts to holding a class of deformable parts. In
this class, a part is a linearly elastic, frictionless polygon
with a finite element mesh and given stiffness matrix.
- Grasping
at Concavities A simple gripper with two vertical cylindrical
jaws can make contact with external or internal concavities
in polygonal and polyhedral parts to align and grip parts in
form closure.
- Gripper
Point Contacts for Part Alignment The initial resting
pose of many industrial parts differs from the orientation
desired for assembly. We show that it is possible to align
parts during grasping using a standard parallel-jaw gripper.
- Gripper
Linear Contacts for Part Alignment Assembly lines often
require grippers. It is possible in many cases to compensate
for the difference in part orientation using a parallel-jaw
gripper with appropriate jaw design.
- Grasping
at Part Edges We propose a new model for grasping parts
with an industrial parallel-jaw gripper where two define candidate
grasps that are resistant to slipping and torque about the
part's center of mass.
- Trap
Design for Vibratory Bowl Feeders The vibratory bowl
feeder is the oldest and still most common approach to the
automated feeding (orienting) of industrial parts. In this
project we consider a class of vibratory bowl filters that
can be described by removing polygonal sections from the track;
we refer to this class of filters as traps.
- Pin
Design for Part Feeding We consider a sensorless approach
to feeding parts on a conveyor belt using pins (rigid barriers)
to topple parts into desired orientations. Given the n-sided
2D convex projection of an extruded polygonal part, its center
of mass (COM), and coefficients of friction, we develop an
O(n2) algorithm to compute the toppling graph, a new data structure
that represents the mechanics of toppling including rolling
and jamming.
- "Unilateral" Fixturing
of Sheet Metal Parts using Modular Jaws with Plane-Cone Contacts To
fixture sheet metal parts for welding, we propose "unilateral
fixtures" consisting of modular fixturing elements that lie
almost completely on one side of the part. These are based
on cylindrical jaws with conical grooves which provide the
equivalent of 4 point contacts.
- Fixture-Based
Industrial Robot Calibration for Silicon-Wafer Handling Semiconductor
manufacturing industry requires highly accurate robot operation
with short downtime. We develop a fast, low cost and easy-to-operate
calibration system for wafer-handling robots. The system is
defined by a fixture and a simple compensation algorithm. Given
robot repeatability, endeffector uncertainties, and the tolerance
requirements of wafer placement points, we derive fixture design
and placement specifications based on worst-case and statistical
tolerance models. We verify our resultant design by physical
experiments in a factory-floor environment.
- FixtureNet:
a Feasibility Study for Geometric CAD Evaluation via the WWW Fixturenet
is an interactive Java applet that allows users to draw a part.
Fixturenet then computes and displays all modular fixtures
that will hold that part. Users can click and drag on the resulting
displays to visualize reaction forces.
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Medical Robotics: Steerable Needles, Dose Delivery
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