Francisco Yumbla

Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL) · Facultad de Ingeniería en Mecánica y Ciencias de la Producción

Artificial tactile sensing is important for many robotic manipulation tasks such as environment exploration and object grasping. This paper presents a multilayer flexible force tactile sensor array. The sensor consists of two conductive electrodes spaced by an intermediate layer made from a double-sided tape. The intermediate layer has different-si...

This paper explores the development of intelligent and adaptive interaction control strategies for physical human-robot-environment interaction. Collaborative robots with variable admittance control have shown promising results in providing compliant behavior of the robot's end-effector in response to human guidance. However, instability can arise...

A service robot needs integration of symbolic reasoning for high-level task planning and geometric computation for low-level motion planning to provide services in an everyday human-living environment. For this purpose, one may develop individual modules for object recognition, knowledge inference, task planning, and motion planning, which requires...

Grasping and holding objects are essential tasks for robotic manipulators. However, the development of universal grippers capable of manipulating unknown objects with widely varying shapes and surface properties remains a challenge. To address this, we present a novel reconfigurable soft gripper (OobSoft) based on Oobleck, deposited on a rubber mem...

This work proposes an online task-scheduling method using mixed-integer programming for a multi-tasking problem regarding a dual-arm cooking robot in a controlled environment. Given each task’s processing time, their location in the working space, dependency, the required number of arms, and the kinematic constraints of the dual-arm robot, the prop...

The need for combined task and motion planning (CTAMP) in robotics is well known as robotic technologies become more mature. The goal of CTAMP is to determine a proper sequence of a robot’s actions based on symbolic and geometric reasoning. Because of the fundamental difference in symbolic and geometric reasoning, a CTAMP system often requires an i...

In this paper, a new comprehensive dynamic friction model for a collaborative industrial robot joint that considers the velocity, temperature, and load torque is proposed. The variation of load-dependent friction among the four-quadrant operation depending on the sign of load-torque and speed is studied. The new model’s passivity property is analyz...

In this study, we propose the use of a distribute manipulator for repositioning and alignment process of cable connectors to obtain the accurate pose of the connector. The accurate pose is critical for a successful mating process in wiring harness assembly tasks. Conventional actuators such as robotics grippers rely on active manipulations; for exa...

Stiffness adjustability is one of the key characteristics that help humans achieve safe and reliable motions. This paper aims to realize the simultaneous position-stiffness control of an antagonistic joint driven by a type of super-coiled polymer (SCP) artificial muscles, made from a combination of Spandex and nylon fibers. A nonlinear model that c...

A passive aligning strategy for the assembly task of a ribbon cable is presented using a sliding surface gripper. Once the gripper grasps the ribbon cable, the sliding surface of the gripper pulls the cable in one direction, and at the end of the pulling process, the box-shaped structure of the fingertip of the gripper passively aligns the cable to...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to propose a novel plane-based mapping method for legged-robot navigation in a stairway environment. Design/methodology/approach The approach implemented in this study estimates a plane for each step of a stairway using a weighted average of sensor measurements and predictions. It segments planes from point clo...

The purpose of this paper focuses on the use of the Virtual Robotics Experimental Platform (V-REP) and the Robotics Operative System (ROS) to control and simulate different configurations of the Bioloid GP(Grand-Prix) robot. The V-REP simulator includes the full robot kinematic models and integrated sensors in different scenes. We present how to co...

In this research, we studied the mating tolerance of various plug-in cable connectors and provide a mating tolerance dataset of 70 different connectors. This dataset will be highly advantageous to industries for wire harness assembly tasks using robots. Understanding the mating tolerance is crucial for automating the mating process because it is cl...