Taarlab

Infrastructures

The TaarLab is situated on the second floor of Faculty of New Sciences and Technologies,University of Tehran. The laboratory is equipped with state-of-the-art facilities located in one room. The network of computers includes PC work stations running under Linux and Windows. However, staffs are encouraged to use Linux and open source programs. From industrial funding, the TAAR laboratory is equipped now with four parallel robots, a NAO H25, a Boiloid, a Mindstorms, 7 e-pucks. The laboratory is also equipped with 7 servo motors, a complete set of servo-pneumatic equipments for a Gough-Stewart platform, three linear guides, four EX-106+ Dynamixel and three AX-12+ servo motors, two USB2Dynamixel and one CMUcam

360 Virtual Tour

Human and Robot Interaction Laboratory always uses new approaches to communicate with other research centers and researchers. In this regard, it is a great pleasure to introduce our 360 virtual tour in which you have a comprehensive visit of the whole Laboratory space and infrastructures. This provides another opportunity to explore our ten different research sections of our laboratory and to see the progress made in three years. Moreover, in this virtual tour, upon clicking on a robot a pop-up window will be opened in which you can see all the information about the corresponding robot plus some related robots. For more information regarding the Human and Robot Interaction Laboratory activities, you are cordially invited to contact us for a personal visit. To start the virtual tour, click here

Taarlab in press

National Grand Project

This project, funded (170000 USD) by ministry of Health and Medical Education and the Presidency of Islamic Republic of Iran and Vice-Presidency for Science and Technology, consists of innovating a new haptic device specified for dental trainer unit, control it in real-time imaginary graphical situation and manufacturing the platform proportionate for human organic situation. These simulators seek to train pre-clinical skills in dentistry. The goal is to ensure that pre-clinicians’ skills are systematically trained, time-effective and highly accurate.

Serial Manipulators

Investigation on the kinematic and dynamic properties and control methodologies of serial robots is the subject of many researches in TaarLab. Despite of the long history of serial robots, there are still several gaps to be filled. In TaarLab, the main focus on serial robots consists in proposing real-time approach for dynamic and interactive simulation of such a robot. In TaarLab, researches on different topics of serial robots are envisaged in such a way that provides an avenue to build, in the near future, an interactive serial arm to be able to interact with human arm, an illustrative example of human-robot interaction. To this end, the following projects are under progress:

Parallel Mechanisms

In TaarLab, parallel robots are investigated under different perspectives. Different studies are conducted on this regard. Since extensive studies have been carried out in the literature on such a robot thus more emphasis is placed on applying novel optimization approach, such as interval analysis and convex optimization, to the end of designing the most promising one in term of kinematic and dynamic properties. Topics under investigation for parallel robots can be summarized as:

Cable-driven Parallel Manipulators

Cable driven redundant parallel robots are a new generation of parallel robots in which instead of rigid actuators cable are used to produce the desired motion pattern. The fact of using cable arises a lot of challenge in analyzing the kinematics and dynamics of such a robot. Cable driven redundant parallel robots consist of a moving platform which is connected by the means of actuated cables to the base. Redundancy is an inherent requirement for such a mechanism due to the fact that cables can only pull but cannot push the moving platform. Thus, in a non-singular posture, the moving platform it can perform n Degree-of-freedom (DOF) by considering at least n+1 cables. Cable driven redundant parallel robots are special design of parallel robots that heritage the advantages of parallel robots such as high acceleration and high load carrying capability and at the same time, have alleviated some of their shortcomings, such as restricted workspace.

The widespread of cable driven redundant parallel robots in different industrial applications urges TaarLab to initiate several projects which are listed as follows:

Humanoid Robots

The main objective of Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory (TaarLab) is advancing human-robot interaction research for various types of robots. Our lab is equipped with a number of humanoids for carrying out our research on "enabling a humanoid to collaboratively work beside humans and do its tasks autonomously in a safe manner". As a first step, to deal with the kinematics modeling of humanoids, a Mindstorm and a Bioloid robot were purchased. After a while, to study the stability and external perturbation rejection issues of humanoids, we acquired NAO H25; we chose this humanoid not only because of its various capabilities such as four FSRs under each foot, accelerometers and gyroscope in comparison with other versions which are essential to our study, but also because of its small physical size and its fair price.

Currently in TaarLab we are conducting research work on a number of topics which can be summarized as follows:

Mobile Robots

Single- and multi-agent control of mobile unmanned vehicles, including among others, mobile robots, are of paramount contributions to evolution and enhancement of human-robot and robot-robot interactions in TaarLab, from both practical and theoretical points of view. The main goal of our research projects conducted on the domain of mobile robots is "Controlling a mobile robot in order that it could perform a desired task safely and autonomously, whether or not being in communication with others ".

For an experimental purpose, a mobile robot should possess at least some of the basic technical facilities, such as proximity sensor, camera, accelerometer, sound sensor and wireless communication tool. Consequently, in the beginning, TaarLab was equipped with seven e-pucks, for they, despite their diminutive size, report thorough sensory odometry information, and as well, are priced fairly at nearly 900 USD. Afterward, in order to make way for faster implementation of some real-time procedures, such as optimal vision-based obstacle avoidance, TaarLab developed a FPGA-based mobile robot, called MRTQ.

In what follows, some captions of our research projects carried out on the field of mobile robots, using either e-puck or MRTQ, are provided and briefly explained.

Haptic devices

Haptic technology, or haptics, is a tactile feedback technology which takes advantage of the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, or motions to the user. This mechanical stimulation can be used to assist in the creation of virtual objects in a computer simulation, to control such virtual objects, and to enhance the remote control of machines and devices (telerobotics). It has been described as "doing what computer graphics does for vision, for the sense of touch ". Haptic devices may incorporate tactile sensors that measure forces exerted by the user on the interface.

Haptic projects in Taarlab is now sponsored by Iran's presidency office. The grant value is about 170,000 USD.

Taarlab's ongoing research areas in the field of Haptics are as follows:

Embedded Systems

Electronic systems design and mobile robot control has dramatically changed from the beginning up to now. Need to miniaturize the systems, decrease the noise and consumption and also get higher calculation and processing ability are the main goals of designers and developers.

FPGA, is one of the most capable integrated circuits in electronic world which enable designers in various industries such as martial, aerospace, medical industries etc. to design desired architecture on these integrated circuits based on requirements and to apply them for special usages. Safe IPs, low electrical consumption, resistance to telecommunication, electromagnetic and heat, fast processing capability and real time of analogue and digital signals, have made these integrated circuits as the main choice of research teams in the world to develop industrial tools, home appliances and particularly hazardous industries and martial systems which face various threats and noises every time. This group goal is to make a robot under embedded system based on FPGA and do special mechanical and electronic design for mobile robots as an industrial and educational robot platform.

Respective to these issues and dramatic changes happened since 2005 by designing and presenting various hard ware and software processors in different models such as NIOSII software core and by presenting new FPGA models named SOC with ARM hardware core to global market in 2012, and these processors support by high level languages like C, C++ and JAVA, … and hardware development language simultaneously which consequently has expanded these integrated circuits capabilities, the team decided to design and develop a robot which only uses FPGA in its processes such as robot navigation, signal and image processing and present it as a new educational robot style to enthusiasts. Besides, with increasing the pace of designing system in FPGA, by new design method which will be specified below, mobile robots with working capability in industrial, martial, noisy environments and generally robots with real functional capabilities and more powerful than similar ones with microcontroller will be developed, and researchers can learn these methods by this educational robot and use it in their main designs.

Finally, this group could make and use a mobile robot in embedded systems based on FPGA with image processing, robot control and guidance and launching various sensors capabilities. MRTQ and NTACO are two robots designed in this group and researcher develop its from 2012 up to now.

Human and Robot Interaction

Nowadays, advancements in robotics have enabled robotic systems to go beyond their classical restrictions up to a point that not only they are a viable replacement for human workforce, but they can also act alongside or in direct interaction with human beings. One of the resulting focus areas of this development is Humanoid- Robot Interaction (HRI), e.g., in the context of collaborative robots that work with human workforce on the floor of large scale factories, elderly care robots, service robots, personal robots and even robotic pets. The HRI discipline will as a result generate new standards to insure a safe interaction between robotic systems and human beings on a variety of levels from physical to emotional.

TaarLab possesses a number of robotic platforms and its researchers have already obtained significant experiences in Parallel Mechanisms (PMs). In the near future we are going to practice new approaches in the HRI field which would cover a wide range of topics whilst maintaining a bigger focus on Physical HRI topics (pHRI). Some of these topics that are of interest to us and will be covered are listed below: