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A patina is essentially the weathered look a piece of leather takes on as it ages. The patina finishing aspect can be also generated or grown artificially by scrubbing the leather surface with specific products. These kinds of manual finishing operations on small objects are delicate and regularly need slight corrections carried out by skilled artisans, which adds complexity to the process automation and implies various key aspects to consider. This research presents a novel approach for automatic and semiautomatic shoe patina growing in the footwear industry using a new co-creative method based on cooperative robotics. The system automates the process in pursuit of operator time-saving without reducing the work finishing quality. For this purpose, the use of a collaborative robot with a built-in constant contact force control and a collaborative tool are used in this research. The use of both tools in complementarity with the knowledge of the craftsman leads the robot end-effector adaptation to the inherent curved surfaces over the shoe. Besides, some orientation corrections are applied based on the CAD model for the task to be accurately accomplished. The solution has been successfully integrated in a real production line, and it is currently in use.

A patina is essentially the weathered look a piece of leather takes on as it ages. The patina finishing aspect can be also generated or grown artificially by scrubbing the leather surface with specific products. This research proposes a novel solution for bringing over automation to grow patina on leather footwear manufacturing using a new co-creative method based on cooperative robotics. These kinds of manual finishing operations on small objects are delicate and regularly need slight modifications carried out by skilled artisans, which adds complexity to the process automation and implies various key aspects to consider. This novel solution includes the design and implementation of a collaborative tool specially designed to grow patina finishing on shoe surface. The system accelerates the process in pursuit of time-saving without disregarding the work finishing quality. For this purpose, the use of a collaborative robot with a built-in constant contact force control is used in this research, together with an existing software function for manual path recording. The use of both tools in complementarity with the knowledge of the craftsman leads the robot end-effector adaptation to the inherent curved-surfaces over the shoe. Besides, some path corrections and tool orientation improvements are suggested based on data from a CAD model for the task to be accurately accomplished. This work presents a novel approach for automatic and semi-automatic shoe patina growing in the footwear industry. The solution has been successfully integrated in a real production line and it is currently in use.

This article presents a procedure for designing footwear production plants with a Decision Support System combined with an expert system and a simulation approach. The footwear industry has many operations and is labour intensive. Optimisation of plant layout, machinery, and human resources is very important to design the footwear manufacturing system, making adequate investment in space and equipment. In the industry it is essential to reduce the process time, so the research is based on a Decision Support System combined with an expert system and simulation to improve the design of the manufacturing plan. This work contains two case studies, direct injection manufacturing and assembly and carburising methods, which are compared to analyse all the necessary resources to have the best cost–benefit ratio. In each case, a precise knowledge of the type and quantity of machinery and human resources is needed to estimate the production. This comparison has been done through simulations and using a knowledge base of an expert system. The conclusions are presented in which an improvement in production time is obtained by applying the methodology developed in the study.

This paper presents a new software tool, namely RoboClass, to include and manage realistic robots and elements of the environment in Matlab simulations. These elements are loaded from CAD models using an STL-file and can be as detailed as desired. All the steps involved in the process are explained in detail. Furthermore, two illustrative examples are considered to show the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed approach: the ABB-IRB120 industrial robot and the CSA research robot. The developed tool is especially useful both for robotics research and teaching.

[EN] Surface treatment operations, such as sanding, deburring, finishing, grinding, polishing, etc. are progressively becoming more automated using robotic systems. However, previous research in this field used a completely automatic operation of the robot system or considered a low degree of human-robot interaction. Therefore, to overcome this issue, this work develops a truly synergistic cooperation between the human operator and the robot system to get the best from both. In particular, in the application developed in this work the human operator provides flexibility, guiding the tool of the robot system to treat arbitrary regions of the workpiece surface; while the robot system provides strength, accuracy and security, not only holding the tool and keeping the right tool orientation, but also guaranteeing a smooth approach to the workpiece and confining the tool within the allowed area close to the workpiece. Moreover, to add more flexibility to the proposed method, when the user is not guiding the robot tool, a robot automatic operation is activated to perform the treatment in prior established regions. Furthermore, a camera network is used to get a global view of the robot workspace in order to obtain the workpiece location accurately and in real-time. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown with several experiments using a 6R robotic arm., This research was founded by the Spanish Government and the Generalitat Valenciana under Grants PID2020-117421RB-C21, GV/2021/181 and ACIF/2019/007.

[EN] This article develops a human-robot cooperation to carry out treatments such as sanding, polishing, etc. on the surface of a known rigid object. For this purpose, a vision system is considered to get the object location to ensure not only the perpendicularity of the obot tool to the object surface but also a smooth approach of the tool to the surface. In order to add flexibility, the proposal includes the simultaneous combination of automatic and manual modes of operation. Thus, the human user can guide the robot tool to treat arbitrary areas (manual mode) and, when the operator releases the tool, the robot goes into the automatic mode to treat prior established areas. The method uses a task prioritization framework and three types of controllers: an admittance controller for the tool guidance; a hybrid controller to modify the tool orientation and, in the automatic mode, the tool position; and a sliding mode controller to limit the velocity at which the tool approaches the object surface. The applicability and efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated experimentally using a conventional 6R robot arm., This work was supported in part by the Spanish Government, and in part by the Generalitat Valenciana under Grant DPI2017-87656-C2-1-R and Grant ACIF/2019/007.

[EN] This work presents a robotic-based solution devised to automate the product packaging in industrial environments. Although the proposed approach is illustrated for the case of the shoe industry, it applies to many other products requiring similar packaging processes. The main advantage obtained with the automated task is that productivity could be significantly increased. The key algorithms for the developed robot system are: object detection using a computer vision system; object grasping; trajectory planning with collision avoidance; and operator interaction using a force/torque sensor. All these algorithms have been experimentally tested in the laboratory to show the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach., This work has been partly supported by Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Spanish Government [Grant No. RTC201654086 and PRI-AIBDE-2011-1219], by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) of the German Government (Projekt-ID 54368155) and by ROBOFOOT project [Grant No. 260159] of the European Commission.

[EN] This paper presents the integration of a robotic system in a human-centered environment, as it can be found in the shoe manufacturing industry. Fashion footwear is nowadays mainly handcrafted due to the big amount of small production tasks. Therefore, the introduction of intelligent robotic systems in this industry may contribute to automate and improve the manual production steps, such us polishing, cleaning, packaging, and visual inspection. Due to the high complexity of the manual tasks in shoe production, cooperative robotic systems (which can work in collaboration with humans) are required. Thus, the focus of the robot lays on grasping, collision detection, and avoidance, as well as on considering the human intervention to supervise the work being performed. For this research, the robot has been equipped with a Kinect camera and a wrist force/ torque sensor so that it is able to detect human interaction and the dynamic environment in order to modify the robot¿s behavior. To illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach, this work presents the experimental results obtained for two actual platforms, which are located at different research laboratories, that share similarities in their morphology, sensor equipment and actuation system., This work has been partly supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Spanish Government (Key No.: 0201603139 of Invest in Spain program and Grant No. RTC-2016-5408-6) and by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) of the German Government (Projekt-ID 54368155).

[EN] A collaborative tool for robotic polishing is developed in this work in order to allow the simultaneous operation of the robot system and human operator to cooperatively carry out the polishing task. For this purpose, the collaborative environment is detailed and the polishing application is designed. Moreover, the polishing tool is developed and its implementation using the minimum viable product approach is obtained. Furthermore, a robust hybrid position-force control is proposed to use the developed tool attached to a robot system and some experiments are given to show its performance., This work was supported in part by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (Spanish Government) under project [DPI2017-87656-C2-1-R] and the Generalitat Valenciana under Grant [VALi+ d APOSTD/2016/044].

[EN] This paper presents a human-robot closely collaborative solution to cooperatively perform surface treatment tasks such as polishing, grinding, finishing, deburring, etc. The proposed scheme is based on task priority and non-conventional sliding mode control. Furthermore, the proposal includes two force sensors attached to the manipulator end-effector and tool: one sensor is used to properly accomplish the surface treatment task, while the second one is used by the operator to guide the robot tool. The applicability and feasibility of the proposed collaborative solution for robotic surface treatment are substantiated by experimental results using a redundant 7R manipulator: the Sawyer collaborative robot., This work was supported in part by the Spanish Government under the project DPI-201787656-C2-1-R and the Generalitat Valenciana under Grant VALi+d.

© 2018 IEEE. This paper presents a control architecture readily suitable for surface treatment tasks such as polishing, grinding, finishing or deburring as carried out by a human operator, with the added benefit of accuracy, recurrence and physical strength as administered by a robotic manipulator partner. The shared strategy effectively couples the human operator propioceptive abilities and fine skills through his interactions with the autonomous physical agent. The novel proposed control scheme is based on task prioritization and a non-conventional sliding mode control, which is considered to benefit from its inherent robustness and low computational cost. The system relies on two force sensors, one located between the last link of the robot and the surface treatment tool, and the other located in some place of the robot end-effector: the former is used to suitably accomplish the conditioning task, while the latter is used by the operator to manually guide the robotic tool. When the operator chooses to cease guiding the tool, the robot motion safely switches back to an automatic reference tracking. The paper presents the theories for the novel collaborative controller, whilst its effectiveness for robotic surface treatment is substantiated by experimental results using a redundant 7R manipulator and a mock-up conditioning tool.

[EN] This work presents a hybrid position-force control of robots for surface polishing using task priority. The robot force control is designed using sliding mode ideas in order to benefit from its inherent robustness and low computational cost. In order to avoid the chattering drawback typically present in sliding mode control, several chattering-free controllers are evaluated and tested. A distinctive feature of the method is that the sliding mode force task is defined using not only equality constraints but also inequality constraints, which are satisfied using conventional and nonconventional sliding mode control, respectively. Moreover, a lower priority tracking controller is defined to follow the desired reference trajectory on the surface being polished. The applicability and the effectiveness of the proposed approach considering the mentioned chattering-free controllers are substantiated by experimental results using a redundant 7R manipulator., Spanish Government, Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (DPI2017-87656-C2-1-R). Generalitat Valenciana, Conselleria d'Educacion, Investigacion, Cultura i Esport (VALi+d APOSTD/2016/044).

[EN] The article describes the design and implementation of a computer based industrial system for production of saffron. The proposal is based on an automated greenhouse with temperature, light and irrigation control together with harvesting and stigma separation devices. The harvesting device has been specifically developed using scalability properties and computer vision. The greenhouse is designed to increase the crop density if required generating a more sustainable and continuous production. The main advantages of the proposed method are as follows: the harvesting of the saffron flower and the procedure to get the stigmas are carried out in the same process; the greenhouse allows to significantly extend the flowering time of the saffron plant; and higher productivity per worker and per planting area is achieved. In order to show the feasibility and applicability of the proposed approach, real experimentation has been carried out for the extension of the flowering time and for the harvesting and stigma separation devices and successful results have been obtained., This work has been partially supported by the European Commission under Grant No. 683987. The authors thank Enrique Gil Botella for helping with the machine design and drawings and Angel Flores Pérez for helping to generate the program for the cutting system.

[EN] This work presents a hybrid position-force control of robots in order to apply surface treatments such as polishing, grinding, finishing, deburring, etc. The robot force control is designed using sliding mode concepts to benefit from robustness. In particular, the sliding mode force task is defined using equality constraints to attain the desired tool pressure on the surface, as well as to keep the tool orientation perpendicular to the surface. In order to deal with sudden changes in material stiffness, which are ultimately transferred to the polishing tool and can produce instability and compromise polishing performance, several adaptive switching gain laws are considered and compared. Moreover, a lower priority tracking controller is defined to follow the desired reference trajectory on the surface being polished. Hence, deviations from the reference trajectory are allowed if such deviations are required to satisfy the constraints mentioned above. Finally, a third-level task is also considered for the case of redundant robots in order to use the remaining degrees of freedom to keep the manipulator close to the home configuration with safety in mind. The main advantages of the method are increased robustness and low computational cost. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach are substantiated by experimental results using a redundant 7R manipulator: the Rethink Robotics Sawyer collaborative robot., This work was supported in part by the Spanish Government under the project DPI2017-87656-C2-1-R and the Generalitat Valenciana under Grants VALi + d APOSTD/2016/044 and BEST/2017/029.

[EN] This work presents the automation of a multiplace hyperbaric chamber. It includes the system modeling, identification, controller calculation and system validation. With the proposed approach a good pressure profile tracking and repeatability are achieved. Moreover, the proposed automation includes the implementation of powerful treatment tools such as Pause and Alleviation procedures. The control system implemented is based on a special zero-pole cancellation regulator. Experimental results are provided to illustrate the behavior of the automated chamber. It is important to remark that the chamber automated in this work is being successfully used in a real hospital since 2015 treating more than 40 patients per day, five days a week., The authors would like to thanks MEDIBAROX (unit of the Perpetuo Socorro Hospital) and the "Catedra de Medicina Hiperbarica" of the Miguel Hernandez University for their support and for finally implementing the control law described in this article. The authors would also like to thank Francisco Aracil Meseguer for his help with the chamber 3D modeling.

This paper presents a multimodal Human-Machine Interface system that combines an Electrooculography Interface and a Brain-Machine Interface. This multimodal interface has been used to control a robotic arm to perform pick and place tasks in a three dimensional environment. Five volunteers were asked to pick two boxes and place them in different positions. The results prove the feasibility of the system in the performance of pick and place tasks. By using the multimodal interface, all the volunteers (even naive users) were able to successfully move two objects within a satisfactory period of time with the help of the robotic arm. A multimodal HMI to perform pick and place tasks with a robotic arm is presented.The EOG interface is applied to control planar movements and to operate the gripper.The BMI is used to control the height of the gripper through two mental tasks.The system had been tested by five healthy subjects.The results prove the feasibility of the system in the performance of these tasks.

This article presents the development of a new concept for an assistive robotic device that can help people as needed, considering their residual physical and cognitive abilities, and, at the same time, increase their cognitive and physical abilities in activities of daily living (ADLs), such as drinking, cooking, eating, personal hygiene, and grooming.

The paper presents the developing of a new robotic system for the administration of a highly sophisticated therapy to stroke patients. This therapy is able to maximize patient motivation and involvement in the therapy and continuously assess the progress of the recovery from the functional viewpoint. Current robotic rehabilitation systems do not include patient information on the control loop. The main novelty of the presented approach is to close patient in the loop and use multisensory data (such as pulse, skin conductance, skin temperature, position, velocity, etc.) to adaptively and dynamically change complexity of the therapy and real-time displays of a virtual reality system in accordance with specific patient requirements. First, an analysis of subject's physiological responses to different tasks is presented with the objective to select the best candidate of physiological signals to estimate the patient physiological state during the execution of a virtual rehabilitation task. Then, the design of a prototype of multimodal robotic platform is defined and developed to validate the scientific value of the proposed approach.

[EN] This paper presents a wireless system to send biosignals outside a hyperbaric chamber avoiding wires going through the chamber walls. Hyperbaric chambers are becoming more and more common due to new indications of hyperbaric oxygen treatments. Metallic walls physically isolate patients inside the chamber, where getting a patient's vital signs turns into a painstaking task. The paper proposes using a ZigBee-based network to wirelessly transmit the patient's biosignals to the outside of the chamber. In particular, a wearable battery supported device has been designed, implemented and tested. Although the implementation has been conducted to transmit the electrocardiography signal, the device can be easily adapted to consider other biosignals., The authors would like to thanks the University of Balearic Islands (UIB), the Miguel Hernandez University (UMH), MEDIBAROX unit of the Perpetuo Socorro Hospital and the "Catedra de Medicina Hiperbarica" (UMH) for their support allowing the use of its facilities for this work. The authors would also like to thank Borja Mas Boned for his help designing the LabVIEW application. This research has been carried out with funding and promotion of "Catedra de Medicina Hiperbarica" of the Miguel Hernandez University. http://nbio.umh.es/es/2010/12/01/catedra-de-medicina-hiperbarica-medibarox/.

This paper describes an assistive robot application that combines a portable wireless interface based on electrooculography (EOG) and Radiofrequency Identification (RFID) technology. This assistive application is aimed at handicapped users who suffer from a severe motor disability. To that end, a realistic application has been designed. It consists of an environment in which users can bring a glass and a water bottle closer with only the help of their eye movement using a real robot arm. RFID will be used as a support to the EOG interface in a shared control architecture by storing information of the objects in tags placed on the scene. Five volunteers tested the assistive robot application. The results obtained show that all of them were able to finish the tests in a suitable time and the results improved with practice and training. This proves that the assistive robot application can be a feasible way to help handicapped users.

This paper describes how a robotic scrub nurse has been developed to assist human scrub nurses (also called delivery scrub nurses) during surgical interventions. The developed system in this work (nicknamed Quirubot) is equipped with a speech recognition module to recognize the requested surgical instrument; Quirubot locates this element on a storage tray using computer vision and pattern recognition and picks the element from the tray placing it on an interchange tray where the human scrub nurse can finally use this tool. Moreover, to implement the manipulation of surgical instruments, an electromagnetic gripper has been adapted to pick and place them. Fanuc LR Mate 200iB robot has been electrically modified to add a new connector devoted to control the electromagnetic gripper. Nowadays Quirubot can identify up to 27 surgical instruments and more than 82 spoken instructions; the advantages of the system have been demonstrated using a group of experienced and intermediate skilled scrub nurses in a open abdominal aortic aneurysm surgery simulation (experiments performed in a robotics lab and an operating room). After this study, the use of a robotic scrub nurse is justified in an nBio operating room to improve the system up to obtaining a more robust version to be used at the Hospital Universitario de Sant Joan d'Alacant.

This paper presents a microdevice for monitoring, control and management of electric loads at home. The key idea is to compact the electronic design as much as possible in order to install it inside a Schuko socket. Moreover, the electronic Schuko socket (electronic microdevice + Schuko socket) has the feature of communicating with a central unit and with other microdevices over the existing powerlines. Using the existing power lines, the proposed device can be installed in new buildings or in old ones. The main use of this device is to monitor, control and manage electric loads to save energy and prevent accidents produced by different kind of devices (e.g., iron) used in domestic tasks. The developed smart device is based on a single phase multifunction energy meter manufactured by Analog Devices (ADE7753) to measure the consumption of electrical energy and then to transmit it using a serial interface. To provide current measurement information to the ADE7753, an ultra flat SMD open loop integrated circuit current transducer based on the Hall effect principle manufactured by Lem (FHS-40P/SP600) has been used. Moreover, each smart device has a PL-3120 smart transceiver manufactured by LonWorks to execute the user's program, to communicate with the ADE7753 via serial interface and to transmit information to the central unit via powerline communication. Experimental results show the exactitude of the measurements made using the developed smart device.

The reliability and robustness of image-based visual servoing systems is still unsolved by the moment. In order to address this issue, a redundant and cooperative 2D visual servoing system based on the information provided by two cameras in eye-in-hand/eye-to-hand configurations is proposed. Its control law has been defined to assure that the whole system is stable if each subsystem is stable and to allow avoiding typical problems of image-based visual servoing systems like task singularities, features extraction errors, disappearance of image features, local minima, etc. Experimental results with an industrial robot manipulator based on Schunk modular motors to demonstrate the stability, performance and robustness of the proposed system are presented.

The aim of rehabilitation robotic area is to research on the application of robotic devices to therapeutic procedures. The goal is to achieve the best possible motor, cognitive and functional recovery for people with impairments following various diseases. Pneumatic actuators are attractive for robotic rehabilitation applications because they are lightweight, powerful, and compliant, but their control has historically been difficult, limiting their use. This article first reviews the current state-of-art in rehabilitation robotic devices with pneumatic actuation systems reporting main features and control issues of each therapeutic device. Then, a new pneumatic rehabilitation robot for proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation therapies and for relearning daily living skills: like taking a glass, drinking, and placing object on shelves is described as a case study and compared with the current pneumatic rehabilitation devices.

The operation room (OR) is a place where the engineers could, and we must, give our work and knowledge. This work presents firstly a smallsummary of the present reality of the technology on the OR, and secondly it presents two examples of applications developed by Spanish engineers for applications of surgical engineering. The material and methods section show a physically realistic simulator where surgeons can simulate and practice the laparoscopic surgical procedures and learn the skills. It is also shown a robot developed to be a intrinsically safe wrist for bringing the orientation to the surgical tool. The results section shows the first experiments, simulations and results for both developments.The main goal of the paper is to motivate the collaboration among surgeons and engineers in such a way we can give new and better systems to the surgical engineering.

In this research a new prediction algorithm based on a Fuzzy Mix of Filters (FMF) is developed. The use of a fuzzy mix is a good solution because it makes intuitive the difficult design task of combining several types of filters, so that the outputs of the filters that work closer to their optimal behavior have higher influence in the predicted values. Therefore the FMF adapts, according to the motion of the tracked object or target, the filter weights to reduce the estimation error. The paper develops the theory about the FMF and uses it for applications with hard real-time requirements. The improvement of the proposed FMF is shown in simulation and an implementation on a parallel processor (FPGA) is presented. As a practical application of the FMF, experimental results are provided for a visual servoing task.

This research develops a real-time implementation of computationally expensive prediction filters by means of task parallelization and task segmentation methodologies in an FPGA. There is a brief description of the prediction filter, then two types of implementations have been developed: PC-based sequential implementations using MATLAB and C++; and an FPGA-based parallelized implementation using VHDL. A comparative study between both types of implementations shows that the execution times measured on the FPGA are considerably lower, making this implementation valid for applications with real-time requirements. Experimental results are shown for a visual servoing task to illustrate the good performance of the proposed algorithms and implementations.

This research presents a new control scheme for visual servoing that takes into account the delay introduced by image acquisition and image processing. Firstly, previous control schemes for visual servoing are discussed and then a new control scheme is proposed and fully described. Afterwards, the capabilities (steady-state errors, stability margins, step time response, etc.) of the proposed control scheme and of previous ones are analytically analyzed and compared. Next, several simulations and experimental results are provided to validate the analytical results and to illustrate the benefits of the proposed control scheme. In particular, it is shown that this new control scheme clearly improves the performance of the previous ones.

This work presents a new system or machine for automated cutting of saffron flowers in order to obtain their stigmas. The conceptual design of this machine together with an efficient implementation is described. The key point of the invention is the use of a vision system to obtain, using image analysis, the optimal cutting point. An effective and flexible computer program processes the flower image and sends the computed value to a driver that positions a simple mechanical cutting system to make a clean cut of the saffron flower. A prototype machine is used for experimentation in order to validate the proposed approach. In particular, the tests show that the method was robust with a high percentage success in flower cutting regardless of the shape and size of the flower, the flower transporter velocity, the flower orientation (upward/downward), etc. An important benefit of the proposed automated cutting system is that the flower cutting rate is increased approximately eight times over that obtained with the traditional hand method.

The past decades have seen the rapid development of upper limb kinematics decoding techniques by performing intracortical recordings of brain signals. However, the use of non-invasive approaches to perform similar decoding procedures is still in its early stages. Recent studies show that there is a correlation between electroencephalographic (EEG) signals and hand-reaching kinematic parameters. From these studies, it could be concluded that the accuracy of upper limb kinematics decoding depends, at least partially, on the characteristics of the performed movement. In this paper, we have studied upper limb movements with different speeds and trajectories in a controlled environment to analyze the influence of movement variability in the decoding performance. To that end, low frequency components of the EEG signals have been decoded with linear models to obtain the position of the volunteer's hand during performed trajectories grasping the end effector of a planar manipulandum. The results confirm that it is possible to obtain kinematic information from low frequency EEG signals and show that decoding performance is significantly influenced by movement variability and tracking accuracy as continuous and slower movements improve the accuracy of the decoder. This is a key factor that should be taken into account in future experimental designs.

In the recent past, the visibility problem in vision-based control has been widely investigated. The proposed solutions generally have a common goal: to always keep the object in the camera's field of view during the visual servoing. Contrary to this solution, we propose a new approach based on the concept of allowing the changes of visibility in image features during the control task. To this aim, the camera invariant visual-servoing approach has been redefined in order to take into account the changes of visibility in image features. A new smooth task function using weighted features is presented, and a continuous control law is obtained starting from it by imposing its exponential decrease to zero. Furthermore, the local stability analysis of the invariant visual-servoing approach with weighted features is presented. Finally, this promising way of dealing with the visibility issue has been successfully tested with an eye-in-hand robotic system.