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The purpose of this paper is to suggest a novel current sensor-less drive system for a novel axial flux-switching permanent-magnet motor drive to reduce the costs and avoid problems caused by faults of the current sensors.

Commonly, a conventional controller needs at least two current sensors; in this paper, the current sensors are removed by replacing estimated stator current with the extended Kalman filter.

A prototype of the novel axial flux-switching permanent-magnet motor is fabricated and tested. It is found that the experimental results confirm the proposed method and show that the control has almost the same performance and ability as the conventional control.

The axial flux-switching permanent-magnet motor is one of the most efficient motors, but current sensor-less control of an axial flux-switching permanent-magnet motor with a sandwiched permanent magnet and a unity displacement winding factor has not been specially reported to date. Thus, in this paper, the authors report on current sensor-less control based on the extended Kalman filter for electric vehicles.

The purpose of this paper is to give a novel sensor‐less manipulation strategy for the high‐precision assembly of an eccentric peg into a hole.

Based on the authors' previous work on the attractive region, this paper proposes the sensorless eccentric peg‐hole insertion strategy. The analysis is based on the visible strategic behaviors by decomposing the high‐dimensional configuration space of the eccentric peg‐hole into two low dimensional configuration subspaces. Then, the robotic manipulations can be designed in the configuration subspaces. Finally, a typical industry application, fitting an eccentric crankshaft into a bearing hole of the automotive air‐conditioners, is used to validate the presented strategy.

The attractive region constructed in the configuration space has been applied to guide the robotic manipulations, such as, the locating and the insertion.

The designed robotic assembly system without using force sensor or flexible wrist has an advantage in terms of expense and durability for the automotive air‐conditioners manufacturing industry.

Most previous work on sensorless manipulation strategy has concentrated on inserting a symmetric peg into a hole. However, for the assembly of an eccentric peg into a hole, the robotic manipulations should be explored in a high‐dimensional configuration space as the six‐DOFs of the eccentric peg. In this paper, the decomposition method of the high‐dimensional configuration space would make the system analysis visible; then, the assembly strategy can be easily designed in the two subspaces.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new joint friction model, which can accurately model the real friction, especially in cases with sudden changes in the motion direction. The identification and sensor-less control algorithm are investigated to verify the validity of this model.

The proposed friction model is nonlinear and it considers the angular displacement and angular velocity of the joint as a secondary compensation for identification. In the present study, the authors design a pipeline – including a manually designed excitation trajectory, a weighted least squares algorithm for identifying the dynamic parameters and a hand guiding controller for the arm’s direct teaching.

Compared with the conventional joint friction model, the proposed method can effectively predict friction factors during the dynamic motion of the arm. Then friction parameters are quantitatively obtained and compared with the proposed friction model and the conventional friction model indirectly. It is found that the average root mean square error of predicted six joints in the proposed method decreases by more than 54%. The arm’s force control with the full torque using the estimated dynamic parameters is qualitatively studied. It is concluded that a light-weight industrial robot can be dragged smoothly by the hand guiding.

In the present study, a systematic pipeline is proposed for identifying and controlling an industrial arm. The whole procedure has been verified in a commercial six DOF industrial arm. Based on the conducted experiment, it is found that the proposed approach is more accurate in comparison with conventional methods. A hand-guiding demo also illustrates that the proposed approach can provide the industrial arm with the full torque compensation. This essential functionality is widely required in many industrial arms such as kinaesthetic teaching.

First, a new friction model is proposed. Based on this model, identifying the dynamic parameter is carried out to obtain a set of model parameters of an industrial arm. Finally, a smooth hand guiding control is demonstrated based on the proposed dynamic model.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a dual peg-in-hole insertion strategy. Dual peg-in-hole insertion is the most common task in manufacturing. Most of the previous work develop the insertion strategy in a two- or three-dimensional space, in which they suppose the initial yaw angle is zero and only concern the roll and pitch angles. However, in some case, the yaw angle could not be ignored due to the pose uncertainty of the peg on the gripper. Therefore, there is a need to design the insertion strategy in a higher-dimensional configuration space.

In this paper, the authors handle the insertion problem by converting it into several sub-problems based on the attractive region formed by the constraints. The existence of the attractive region in the high-dimensional configuration space is first discussed. Then, the construction of the high-dimensional attractive region with its sub-attractive region in the low-dimensional space is proposed. Therefore, the robotic insertion strategy can be designed in the subspace to eliminate some uncertainties between the dual pegs and dual holes.

Dual peg-in-hole insertion is realized without using of force sensors. The proposed strategy is also used to demonstrate the precision dual peg-in-hole insertion, where the clearance between the dual-peg and dual-hole is about 0.02 mm.

The sensor-less insertion strategy will not increase the cost of the assembly system and also can be used in the dual peg-in-hole insertion.

The theoretical and experimental analyses for dual peg-in-hole insertion are proposed without using of force sensor.

The widespread use of drones among the general public has led to an alarming increase in accidents, some with lethal consequences. As drone blades are made from rigid materials and rotate at very high speeds, their impact with a human body can result in fatal injuries. Reliable collision detection combined with near-instantaneous braking of the drone’s rotor(s) can substantially lessen the severity of injuries sustained. The purpose of this paper is to achieve a safety solution which can be easily integrated into new products, or retrofitted into existing systems.

Through a proof of concept, this paper demonstrates the possibility of detecting a collision with a drone propeller absent any hardware modifications to the drone’s instrumentation. The solution relies on current-sensor readings, ordinarily used for monitoring the battery status of electrically actuated drones. The braking is achieved purely by reconfiguring the motor’s control strategy, without the need for additional hardware, as has been the case in previous works.

This paper demonstrates the possibility of detecting a collision with a drone propeller absent any hardware modifications to the drone’s instrumentation.

Compared to previous works which require installing additional hardware, the solution is purely software. This makes it very easy to integrate into existing systems or new products, at no additional cost. In experiments conducted on a prototype system, the solution was shown capable of detecting a collision and braking the motor in fewer than 20 ms. This allowed attenuating centimetre-deep cuts made to a piece of meat by an unprotected rotor to mere superficial scratches.

This purpose of this paper is to design a peg-in-hole controller for a cable-driven serial robot with compliant wrist (CDSR-CW) using cable tensions and joint positions. The peg is connected to the robot link through a CW. It is required that the controller does not rely on any external sensors such as 6-axis wrist force/torque (F/T) sensor, and only the compliance matrix’s estimated value of the CW is known.

First, the peg-in-hole assembly system based on a CDSR-CW is analyzed. Second, a characterization algorithm using micro cable tensions and joint positions to express the elastic F/T at the CW is established. Next, under the premise of only knowing the compliance matrix’s estimate, a peg-in-hole controller based on force/position hybrid control is proposed.

The experiment results show that the plug contact F/T can be tracked well. This verifies the validity and correctness of the characterization algorithm and peg-in-hole controller for CDSR-CWs in this paper.

First, to the authors’ knowledge, there is no relevant work about the peg-in-hole assembly task using a CDSR-CW. Besides, the proposed characterization algorithm for the elastic F/T makes the peg-in-hole controller get rid of the dependence on the F/T sensor, which expands the application scenarios of the peg-in-hole controller. Finally, the controller does not require an accurate compliance matrix, which also increases its applicability.

The efficient speed controller is found to be an important requirement to run the motor for the brushless direct current (BLDC) motor. This requirement is considered as superior, as it may increase the operating speed and system efficiency. In the existing methods, proportional plus integral (PI) controller has been included because of its simple architecture. But the PI controller produces load disturbance, control complexity and some parametric (Proportional plus integral) variations. The purpose of this proposed controller is to overcome the problems produced by PI controller in BLDC motor.

The proposed BLDC motor is developed with fixed order H-infinity controller. In this architecture, both the weight functions and transfer functions were included to design the controller. This controller has been included in this BLDC to detect the rotor position. The optimal position of rotor is identified by introducing particle swarm optimization algorithm.

The torque that obtained in the motor is highly reduced by this proposed controller and also enhances the speed. The BLDC motor is modelled in a MATLAB environment.

The performance of the torque, speed and back electro-motive force is analysed and compared with the existing controllers such as fuzzy proportional plus integral plus derivative, sensing algorithm and fuzzy proportional plus derivative controller.

Simulation results show that the proposed technique gives better results than the other existing controllers.

This paper seeks to report on the Robot Award of Japan and to review the award winners of 2010.

The paper is based on findings at the exhibition, published papers and in‐depth interviews with award winners.

The Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry of Japanese Government is trying to create a new robotic business and the industry and academia is responding to it.

The paper reviews the direction of Japan's robot business.

The paper focuses on commercial success and potentials rather than academic value or intriguing technology.

The purpose of this paper is to review the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo, Japan 2009, with emphasis on new trend of Japanese robot industry.

This paper is based on in‐depth interviews with exhibitors and the reporter's insight in Japanese robot industry.

A big change is observed in the direction of the Japanese industrial robotics in an attempt to overcome the economic crisis.

New markets, new applications, new robot types, and new robot‐based production systems will be emerging.

This is the first report describing the “change” in the Japanese robot industry after the breakout of the world economy recession.