This paper is a summary of the recently accomplished research work on flexible gripping systems. The goal is to develop a gripper which can be used for a great amount of geometrically variant workpieces. The economic aspect is of particular importance during the whole development. The high flexibility of the gripper is obtained by three parallel used principles. These are human and computer based analysis of the gripping object as well as mechanical adaptation of the gripper to the object with the help of servo motors. The focus is on the gripping of free-form surfaces with suction cup.

A resolved acceleration control (RAC) and proportional-integral active force control (PIAFC) is proposed as an approach for the robust motion control of a mobile manipulator (MM) comprising a differentially driven wheeled mobile platform with a two-link planar arm mounted on top of the platform. The study emphasizes on the integrated kinematic and dynamic control strategy in which the RAC is used to manipulate the kinematic component while the PIAFC is implemented to compensate the dynamic effects including the bounded known/unknown disturbances and uncertainties. The effectivenss and robustness of the proposed scheme are investigated through a rigorous simulation study and later complemented with experimental results obtained through a number of experiments performed on a fully developed working prototype in a laboratory environment. A number of disturbances in the form of vibratory and impact forces are deliberately introduced into the system to evaluate the system performances. The investigation clearly demonstrates the extreme robustness feature of the proposed control scheme compared to other systems considered in the study.

This paper investigates the problem of the dynamic balance control of multi-arm free-floating space robot during capturing an active object in close proximity. The position and orientation of space base will be affected during the operation of space manipulator because of the dynamics coupling between the manipulator and space base. This dynamics coupling is unique characteristics of space robot system. Such a disturbance will produce a serious impact between the manipulator hand and the object. To ensure reliable and precise operation, we propose to develop a space robot system consisting of two arms, with one arm (mission arm) for accomplishing the capture mission, and the other one (balance arm) compensating for the disturbance of the base. We present the coordinated control concept for balance of the attitude of the base using the balance arm. The mission arm can move along the given trajectory to approach and capture the target with no considering the disturbance from the coupling of the base. We establish a relationship between the motion of two arm that can realize the zeros reaction to the base. The simulation studies verified the validity and efficiency of the proposed control method.

Its capabilities cover a wide range of possible styles of algorithms. It is al so a standard environment for testing different techniques of making standard software agents with distributed architecture[10]. Rescue Simulation System also prov ides a standard framework for testing proposed algorithms and mathematical models of disaster events[8]. Designing an autonomous agent set like the one that is required for RoboCup Rescue Simulation is a little bit more of a challenge. Planning effective collaboration for a Multi-Agent team in disastrous environments still remains a challenging area in AI. Efforts of Multi-Agent researchers have provided somewhat of a standard in modeling and designing software. A lot of effort has gone into reaching coordination between different agents and making autonomous decisions that work toward the team goal[9]. But practical results in complicated domains such as RoboCup Rescue Simulation indicate that heuristic criteria still remain as a major part of a successful system[11]. This may signal lack of satisfactory models for these complicated situations.

These mechanisms are built using lighter, cheaper materials, which improve the payload to arm weight ratio, thus resulting in an increase of the speed with lower energy consumption. Moreover these lightweight arms are more safely operated due to the reduced inertia and compliant structure, which is very co nvenient for delicate assembly tasks and interaction with fragile objects, including human beings. However, the dynamic analysis and control of flexible-link manipulators is much more complex than the analysis and control of the equivalent rigid manipulators. From the modelling standpoint, the challenges are associated with the fact th at the non-linear rigid body motions are now strongly coupled with the distributed effects of the flexibility along the mechanical structure. This coupling varies with the system configuration and the load inertia.

Path planning and obstacle avoidance are the two major issues in any navigation system. Wavefront propagation algorithm, as a good path planner, can be used to determine an optimal path. Obstacle avoidance can be achieved using possibility theory. Combining these two functions enable a robot to autonomously navigate to its destination. This paper presents the approach and results in implementing an autonomous navigation system for an indoor mobile robot. The system developed is based on a laser sensor used to retrieve data to update a two dimensional world model of therobot environment. Waypoints in the path are incorporated into the obstacle avoidance. Features such as ageing of objects and smooth motion planning are implemented to enhance efficiency and also to cater for dynamic environments.

This article considers evidence from physical and biological sciences to show machines are deficient compared to biological systems at incorporating intelligence. Machines fall short on two counts: firstly, unlike brains, machines do not self-organize in a recursive manner; secondly, machines are based on classical logic, whereas Nature's intelligence may depend on quantum mechanics.

We present a novel approach to pseudo-feedback-based ad hoc retrieval that uses language models induced from both documents and clusters. First, we treat the pseudo-feedback documents produced in response to the original query as a set of pseudo-queries that themselves can serve as input to the retrieval process. Observing that the documents returned in response to the pseudo-queries can then act as pseudo-queries for subsequent rounds, we arrive at a formulation of pseudo-query-based retrieval as an iterative process. Experiments show that several concrete instantiations of this idea, when applied in conjunction with techniques designed to heighten precision, yield performance results rivaling those of a number of previously-proposed algorithms, including the standard language-modeling approach. The use of cluster-based language models is a key contributing factor to our algorithms' success.

Inspired by the PageRank and HITS (hubs and authorities) algorithms for Web search, we propose a structural re-ranking approach to ad hoc information retrieval: we reorder the documents in an initially retrieved set by exploiting asymmetric relationships between them. Specifically, we consider generation links, which indicate that the language model induced from one document assigns high probability to the text of another; in doing so, we take care to prevent bias against long documents. We study a number of re-ranking criteria based on measures of centrality in the graphs formed by generation links, and show that integrating centrality into standard language-model-based retrieval is quite effective at improving precision at top ranks.

This workshop brings together practioners and researchers who are involved in the everyday aspects of logical systems based on higher-order logic. We hope to create a friendly and highly interactive setting for discussions around the following four topics. Implementation and development of proof assistants based on any notion of impredicativity, automated theorem proving tools for higher-order logic reasoning systems, logical framework technology for the representation of proofs in higher-order logic, formal digital libraries for storing, maintaining and querying databases of proofs. We envision attendees that are interested in fostering the development and visibility of reasoning systems for higher-order logics. We are particularly interested in a discusssion on the development of a higher-order version of the TPTP and in comparisons of the practical strengths of automated higher-order reasoning systems. Additionally, the workshop includes system demonstrations. ESHOL is the successor of the ESCAR and ESFOR workshops held at CADE 2005 and IJCAR 2004.