RoManSy 11. Theory and practice of robots and manipulators. Proceedings of the 11th CISM-IFToMM symposium. Udine, Italy, July 1--4, 1996 (Q1359443)

[The articles of this volume will not be indexed individually. The preceding conference (10th, 1994) has been reviewed (see Zbl 0853.70002).] The lectures present a good survey of the state of research in wide fields of robotics. From the preface: ``This symposium was attended by 59 participants from 13 countries. The proceedings \(\dots\) focus mainly on problems of mechanical engineering and control. In his opening lecture, \textit{O. Khatib} presented an overview of the ongoing efforts, at Standord University, for the development of mobile manipulation systems and summarized the basic models and methodologies for their analysis and control. The 46 papers illustrate significant contributions in mechanics (10 papers), synthesis and design (4), walking machines and mobile robots (13), biomechanical aspects of robots and manipulators (2), control of motion (11), sensing and machine intelligence (3) and applications and performance evaluation (3).'' In the field of mechanics the following subjects are investigated: reducing thruster-flexibility interactions in space robots, modeling and optimisation of an eight-legged pipe-crawling robot, stability of in-parallel planar platform devices, workspaces of planar parallel manipulators, nonlinear control of a parallel robot including motor dynamics, an inverse force analysis of a spherical parallel manipulator, experimental research of dynamics of an elephant trunk type elastic manipulator, vibration suppressing for hydraulically driven large redundant manipulators (including an efficient formulation of the inverse dynamics), nonlinear dynamics of computer controlled machines, identification and compensation of gear friction for modeling of robots. Designing manipulators for both kinematic and dynamic isotropic properties, group theoretical synthesis of binary manipulators, distributed kinematic design from task specification, and optimal design of a shape memory alloy actuator for microgrippers are the topics in the area of synthesis and design. In the field of walking machines, the problems addressed are: direct-search optimization of biped walking, biped walking robot adapting to the real world, simulation of an anthropomorphic running robot, gait control method of robot and biological systems by means of a new control method, gait rhythm generators, mechanical simulation of human walking, mechanical design of an antropomorphic electropneumatic walking robot, and energetic analysis of structures of walking robot legs. Further problems treated in the area of mobile robots are: dynamic control of wheeled mobile robot using sliding mode, group behavior of micro-robots by simulation, active coordination of wheeled vehicles for power minimization, pulse width modulated control for the dynamic tracking of wheeled mobile robots, and multilegged walking robots with dynamic constraints. Biomechanical aspects are investigated with respect to a mastication robot and to the human motion in violin playing. The sector of control of motion investigates problems such as: high performance control of manipulators using base force/torque sensing, control of a redundant SCARA robot in the presence of obstacles, experiments on kinematic control of a two-robot system, optimal path planning for moving objects, stiffness control of an object grasped by a multifingered hand, practical stabilization of robots interacting with dynamic environment, control of redundant robots with singularities in degenerate directions, application of neural networks to control of robot manipulators -- simulation and implementation, active force control of pneumatic actuators, experimental validation on an industrial mobile robot using back propagation algorithm for neural adaptive control, and finally Hopfield's artificial neural networks in multiobjective optimization problems of resource allocations control. Problems of type synthesis of contact sensing elements for robotic fixturing, object-oriented approach to programming a robot system, and contact tasks realization by sensing contact forces are treated in the area of sensing and machine intelligence. Application of force control in telerobotics, a new telerobot system (TELBOT), and a decision-making system for the initial stage implementation of assembly strategies are the examples investigated in the field of applications and performance evaluation.