DEVELOPMENT OF THE FLOWER ROBOT BY USING TENDON MECHNAISM (original) (raw)

A study on the moving mechanism for flower robot

As a service robot, we proposed a flower robot which has several functions, such as moving mechanism, sensing ability, and home appliance functions. Among the various functions, the moving function of the flower robot is very important function. The moving flower robot can be divided as a flower, a stem and leaves. We tried to mimic the blooming of flower, the swaying of the stem and the stirring of the leaves in the wind. For the actuation of the flower robot, we used micromotors and tendon mechanisms. From the motions of the flower, the stem and the leaves, the desired target positions are decided. In addition, based on inverse kinematics and trajectory generations, the overall control system for the moving flower robot is constructed. Through the various experiments, the performances of each part of the flower robot are verified and the characteristics are discussed.

Advanced Stem Mechanism for Flower Robot

As a service robot, we proposed a flower robot which has several functions, such as motion mechanism, sensing ability, and home appliance functions. Among the various functions of flower robot, the motion mechanism is very important function because flower robot should describe their emotion by making gesture. Flower robot can be divided as a flower, a stem and leaves. In previous research, we already proposed stem mechanism actuated by tendons and motors. But this previous stem mechanism has two kinds of drawbacks. Firstly, the previous stem structure has a limited bending angle only about 10 degrees and thus it has the restricted view-angel. Secondly, the stem structure has only two degree of freedom bending motion and it cannot describe various motions. Therefore, we need more advanced stem mechanism which has more degree of freedom in order for the flower robot to express various motions of the flower robot. The new stem mechanism has totally five degree of freedom. Two degrees ...

Group Dancing Mobile Flower Robots with Moving Mechanism, Mobility and Localization Functions

Recently, the diverse robots with flower shape have been developed for use as interior, HRI, performance, and home appliance. In this research, we proposed new type mobile flower robots which have flower-type design, mobility, and localization. Especially, the flower shape robot was designed to mimic the swaying of the branches and the blooming of the flowers. The branches and the flowers were actuated by tendon mechanism. And, the flower robots have the mobile platform which consists of three-wheels with the steering ability, respectively. The mobile platforms of the flower robot can locomote to the desired direction and track to the desired path. The localization of multi mobile flower robot was based on the smart floor using passive RFID tags and the extended Kalman filter to estimate of location(x, y) under nondetection of RFID tags. RFID tags which are equilateral triangulation grid pattern are distributed under the surface of the smart floor and each of RFID tags is able to pr...

A Novel Design of Flower Tying Machine

2020

A prototype model of automated flower string machine is proposed to knot the flowers. In India’s rich culture flower garlands play a vital role. They are used for decorations and adorations of Gods, men and women. Garlanding of flower is a monotonous and time- consuming job. The flower string machine is conceptualized based on the working principle of sewing machine and added multiple kinematic mechanisms to drive the flower feeding and stringing. The flowers will be placed on the conveyor belt and based on process control technique; an innovative knotting mechanism will be used to string the flowers. It is also a customized machine for armless and loss of fingers community. Flower tying machine ensures perfect garlanding in an affordable cost. By this technique, the manual work can be reduced and flower vendors can utilize their time effectively.

A robot to shape your natural plant

Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, 2018

Bio-hybrid systems-close couplings of natural organisms with technology-are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing robots with natural plants, merging useful attributes. Significant synergies arise by combining the plants' ability to efficiently produce shaped material and the robots' ability to extend sensing and decision-making behaviors. However, programming robots to control plant motion and shape requires good knowledge of complex plant behaviors. Therefore, we use machine learning to create a holistic plant model and evolve robot controllers. As a benchmark task we choose obstacle avoidance. We use computer vision to construct a model of plant stem stiffening and motion dynamics by training an LSTM network. The LSTM network acts as a forward model predicting change in the plant, driving the evolution of neural network robot controllers. The evolved controllers augment the plants' natural light-finding and tissue-stiffening behaviors to avoid obstacles and grow desired shapes. We successfully verify the robot controllers and bio-hybrid behavior in reality, with a physical setup and actual plants.

Flower Harvesting Robot Using Computer Vision

International Journal of Engineering Applied Sciences and Technology

over the past decades, horticulture industry can be considered as one of the main contributors of the export sector in developing countries like Ethiopia. The horticulture industry deals with plants, mainly for food, beauty and decoration (flowers). This paper aims at providing a system that can improve outdated ways of harvesting methods. Those are mainly manual and laborious tasks which also took a lot of time. In this paper, a harvesting robot is designed and implemented using raspberry pi microcomputer to build a flower harvesting system that can identify, sort and arrange the flowers being harvested without human interaction. Here, a computer vision technology is applied to identify the types and states of the flowers. A convolution neural network image classifier is used along with deep learning networks. The harvesting activity of the machine is assisted by a 3 DOF robotic arm and additional cutting mechanism attached with cutter blade.

Optimal Flower Pollination Based Nonlinear PID Controller for Pantograph Robot Mechanism

International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research

Pantograph Robot Mechanism is considered a type of parallel manipulator which has been developed largely for industrial applications that need high accuracy and speed. Whereas, it needs a high-performance controller to track preselected trajectory planning. It is also able to carry higher weights than the open-chain mechanism with suitable accuracy and stability; this is because it consists of four active links and one passive link, instead of two links as in the open chain. This study presents a mathematical model for a closed chain pantograph mechanism, where the boundary conditions are taken into account. A complete MATLAB Simulink has been developed to simulate the dynamics of the pantograph robot mechanism. To validate the proposed mathematical model of the pantograph, the corresponding Simscape model had been developed. Also, two different tracking controllers were designed. The first control is the PID controller which had optimized by Flower Pollination (FP) optimization. The second control is an enhanced Nonlinear PID (NLPID) controller where its parameters were obtained by Flower Pollination (FP) optimization based on the effective objective function. A rectangular trajectory was selected to be a position reference of the end effector of the pantograph robot. This task was done using the proposed controllers to investigate the performance. The results show that the NLPID controller-based FP has a better performance compared to the PID controller. The end effector has a less rise time and settling time with high accuracy in the case of the NLPID controller.

SMA bio-robotic mimesis of tendril-based climbing plants: First results

2013 16th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR), 2013

Bio-inspired robots often "come" from the animal world while the plant world has not yet been deeply observed and considered. In this work we addressed a special class of climbing plants, that has evolved to gain height while minimizing the energy expenditure, as a new bio-robotic template: the tendrilbearer plants. These are able to grasp and coil around a support and, after that, push the stem towards the grasped element by recovering a spring-like shape from a wire condition. After the biological analysis, the idea of replicating the grasping by coiling and the pushing by shortening has been focused and replicated by Shape Memory Alloy-based proof of concept prototypes. The results show the feasibility of the approach.

Robotic solutions for pot-plant nurseries

Billion of pots are produced every year in Europe. In many Countries, in particular in Mediterranean area, pot plant nurseries involve a lot of manpower and the degree of mechanization is still low, affecting the competiveness of farms. Moreover, most operations performed on potted-plant are extremely repetitive (e.g. pots handling, trimming, granular fertilization) and some tasks are critical for operator's safety (e.g. spray applications). A number of automatic machines and implements are available on the market, but in most cases the installation of fixed and expansive structures is required. The introduction of small multipurpose robotic platforms, able to navigate autonomously along pot rows, would reduce the manpower requirement improving, at the same time, work safety. The design and the kinematic study of an autonomous robotic platform conceived to operate in pot plant nurseries is presented in this paper. The robot is based on a four drive-and-steering wheels vehicle de...

Model and control of tendon actuated robots

2007

Abstract The use of tendons for the transmission of the forces and the movements in robotic devices has been investigated from several researchers all over the world. The interest in this kind of actuation modality is based on the possibility of optimizing the position of the actuators with respect to the moving part of the robot, in the reduced weight, high reliability, simplicity in the mechanic design and, finally, in the reduced cost of the resulting kinematic chain.