Robotic Creatures

This is an example of a very simple project that can offer a great help. Opening a dustbin cap by using one foot at the same time that the other one is keeping equilibrium can be a difficult task, specially for elderly people.
If the dustbin is placed inside a cabinet, it is possible to easily automate this task by simply attaching a servo to the cap mechanism and a photoresistor. When the cabinet door is opened, light arrives to the photoresistor and activates the opening mechanism. Everything is handled with a pic16f84.

Visual monitoring of the interaction between the robot hand and an object being grasped can improve robust grasping in uncertainty conditions.

We have developed an approach for the visual tracking of a robot hand. It consists on the continuous vision-based recovery of the hand articular pose, based on the principles of Virtual Visual Servoing. It allows to deal with occlusions, light changes and articulated motion.

The potential applications range from estimating the robot hand articular pose under poor hand-eye calibration and joint feedback, until detecting deficient contact configurations, incipient slips, etc.

Last week I visited Västeras, in Sweden, where my PhD thesis was one of the finalists for the Robotdalen Award 2009. We didn’t receive the first price, but I’m very glad to come back to Spain with a Honorable Mention and great new experiences.

I’m very grateful to all the people that where somehow related to the organization of the Robotdalen Day. I really enjoyed these days in Sweden!! and, of course, congratulations to the winner, Davide Scaramuzza, and to the other finalist, Sami Haddadin.

After 5 years of hard work, I successfully completed my PhD last June 10th. Thank you very much to all the people who I have met during all these years. All of them have contributed in some way to this accomplishment. You can download the thesis manuscript from here:“Robot Physical Interaction through the combination of Vision, Tactile and Force Feedback” (6 Mb)