Context
In the Hybrid Interaction Robotics Lab at the University of Twente, research from various disciplines comes together to realize stand-in robotic assistance. We consider any daily life setting with all its uncertainties and variations, be it in healthcare, in industry, or at home. We put a robotic system in any such environment, and we enable the system to assist in the following two ways:
1) by specifically designing system aspects (hardware, software) based on prior knowledge of the situation, and 2) by teaching the system on the spot how to (better) assist in any given task. Well excuted design will ease the required learning, whereas learning will allow flexibility towards problems that are challenging to design beforehand. With this we aim to tackle problems arising from staff shortages and workload. To achieve this, several research lines have been formulated, one being “Co-design principles for transparent interactive systems”
Robot systems for interactive tasks are often an assembly of off-the-shelf components, leading to suboptimal performance. This research line proposes an integrated systematic design approach for high fidelity robot-human and robot-environment interaction, based on application specific requirements. Examples include, highly force transparent robot grippers and responsive master-slave devices. The focus lies on leveraging enabling technologies in mechanisms design, sensor design, controls, and modeling.
Project description
In this project, you are to develop an experimental setup for 1-DOF teleoperation based on Co-Design principles. Taking the entire system, from mechanical linkages through actuators and sensors to controllers running in software into account. Using literature, you are to explore the design space and propose candidate solutions to achieve “optimal transparency”. After a rigorous selection procedure, you will select one of these designs and do the realization and evaluation.
Boundary conditions
- This assignment is a shared assignment between RaM and PE. As a student, you will partially work in the RaM lab and partially in the PE lab. Supervision will be done by both Douwe Dresscher and Jan de Jong
- We are looking for a motivated student with a strong robotics design background who has followed courses such as DPPM 2, Control System Design for Robotics or similar and Telepresence Robotics.