A self-contained truck-mounted brick laying machine can include a frame that can support packs or pallets of bricks placed on a platform. A transfer robot can pick up and move the brick(s). A carousel can be coaxial with a tower. The carousel can transfer the brick(s) via the tower to an articulated and/or telescoping boom. The bricks can be moved along the boom by, e.g., linearly moving shuttles, to reach a brick laying and adhesive applying head. The brick laying and adhesive applying head can mount to an element of the stick, about an axis which is disposed horizontally. The poise of the brick laying and adhesive applying head about the axis can be adjusted and can be set in use so that the base of a clevis of the robotic arm mounts about a horizontal axis, and the tracker component is disposed uppermost on the brick laying and adhesive applying head. The brick laying and adhesive applying head can apply adhesive to the brick and can have a robot that lays the brick. Vision and laser scanning and tracking systems can be provided to allow the measurement of as-built slabs, bricks, the monitoring and adjustment of the process and the monitoring of safety zones. The first, or any course of bricks can have the bricks pre machined by the router module so that the top of the course is level once laid.

A link position and attitude estimating unit 53 (54) of a controller 40 of a mobile robot 1 sequentially estimates the actual position and attitude of a first particular link 2 by using input parameters which at least include at least one of a desired attitude of an in-contact-with-ground link 13 and an observation value of the actual attitude of the first particular link 2, a desired position of the in-contact-with-ground link 13, and an observation value of the actual displacement amount of each joint. The driving force for each joint is adjusted by using the estimated values.

A method for determining a shape of a lumen in an anatomical structure comprises reading information from a plurality of strain sensors disposed substantially along a length of a flexible medical device when the flexible medical device is positioned in the lumen. When the flexible medical device is positioned in the lumen, the flexible medical device conforms to the shape of the lumen. The method further comprises computationally determining, by a processing system, the shape of the lumen based on the information from the plurality of strain sensors.

A robotic post system includes one or more robotic posts having a processor and a memory. The robotic posts may include a manipulation arm and/or a swiveling and/or otherwise moveable trunk and/or base. Sensors provided on the robotic post enable the robotic post to rotate, tilt or move toward another robotic post to orient and secure a lockable band on one post with a lock on another post. A manipulation arm may grasp a lockable band and attach it to a lock, and either post may move away from the other to extend the length of a guide path.

A method for controlling vibration of flexible mechanical arms based on cooperative tracking is disclosed, including: building a dynamic model of the flexible mechanical arm, according to a dynamic characteristic, constructing a flexible mechanical arm group made up of a plurality of flexible mechanical arms, assigning one of the plurality of flexible mechanical arms as a leader and the rest ones as followers which are required to track the leader's motion trajectory so as to realize cooperative work; designing cooperative control-based boundary controllers in combination with a Lyapunov method to realize cooperative work and suppress vibration of the flexible mechanical arms; and constructing a Lyapunov function using Lyapunov direct method to validate stability of the flexible mechanical arms under the control.

A force transmission system as part of a surgical system which may be configured to be a minimally invasive and/or computer assisted surgical system. Operation of the system may be controlled by transmission of a force from a first section to a second section of the system. The first section and the second section may be separated by a partition or a barrier. The first section may be a non-sterile section and the second section may be a sterile section of the surgical system.

A continuum robot control device, configured to control operations of a continuum robot having a bendable portion that is bent by driving at least part of a plurality of wires, includes a kinematics computing unit that computes a driving amount l.sub.k1b of the at least part of the plurality of wires, based on a target bending angle that is a target value for a bending angle of the bendable portion, a compensation amount computing unit that computes a compensation amount for compensation of the driving amount l.sub.k1b, based on the target bending angle, and a displacement of one of the plurality of wires at the target bending angle, and an adding unit and position control unit that set a driving control amount of performing driving control of the at least part of the plurality of wires, based on the driving amount and the compensation amount obtained by computation.

A robot control method, and associated robot controllers and robots operating with such methods and controllers, providing real-time vibration suppression. The control method involves learning to support real-time, vibration-suppressing control. The method uses state-of-the-art machine learning techniques in conjunction with a differentiable dynamics simulator to yield fast and accurate vibration suppression. Vibration suppression using offline simulation approaches that can be computationally expensive may be used to create training data for the controller, which may be provide by a variety of neural network configurations. In other cases, sensory feedback from sensors onboard the robot being controlled can be used to provide training data to account for wear of the robot's components.

A system for controlling a robot arm, a fluid contained in a container is poured into another container. A learning model is generated by a machine learning with teaching data. Practically, a plurality of sets of learning data are acquired, each set including i) time-series information showing a posture of a robot arm which holds a first container holding therein a target fluid and pouring the target fluid from the first container to a second container and ii) a weight of the second container which changes time serially. This learning model is used such that only two types of information consisting of the information showing the posture of the robot arm and the weight of the second container at a first time are inputted to the learning model and information showing the posture of the robot arm at a second time is outputted from the learning model.

The present disclosure generally relates to the field of robotics and computer animation, more particularly, method and apparatus to solve the inverse kinematics problem to control a kinematic chain such as a robot arm or an animation character's skeleton to reach a target position. The new method simulates a kinematic chain whose links and joints are elastic and can be distorted. The method distorts the kinematic chain to move its end to the target position, calculates distortions, and iteratively adjusts link and joint configurations of the kinematic chain to reduce distortions while keeping its end at the target position until a solution with near zero distortions is found. The resulting link and joint configurations of the simulated kinematic chain then can be used for the actual kinematic chain to reach the same target position.