Dr. Avi Weiss

Refereed Papers

Conference Proceedings and Abstracts

Other Publications

Kinematics and dynamics of mobile and motion platforms with emphasis on the design optimization perspective, mobility enablement, cognitive mechanics, jumping biomimetic robots, and dynamics of rigid bodies in magnetic fields.

Omnidirectional Motion Platform – Motion platforms such as those popular in flight simulators are parallel manipulators utilizing six extensible legs to control six degrees of freedom. Such platforms are used due to their ability to bear large weight, but have a very limited range of motion, singularities in their workspace and highly coupled kinematics. This research focuses on developing, modeling, and optimizing the design of an omnidirectional motion platform with unlimited, singularity-free angular motion that is decoupled from the translational motion.
Omnidirectional Mobile Robots – Most mobile robots and ground vehicles are non-holonomic, that is, they have more degrees of freedom than controls. Mobile robots utilizing omnidirectional wheels would be holonomic, thus being able to have full control over the pose of the robot instantly, without resorting to maneuvers circumventing motions that are not available for non-holonomic vehicles (such as lateral motion).
Omnidirectional Wheels design – Omnidirectional wheels are wheels with rollers on their periphery. These rollers allow for a passive degree of freedom in the rollers rolling direction. Different architectures of these wheels exist, each with its advantages and disadvantages. The common problem with such wheels is their low load capacity due to the fact that the load is concentrated on the axis of the small rollers as opposed to the large axis of the wheel. In order to be able to utilize such omnidirectional wheels for high-load vehicles, this problem must be resolved.
Electromagnetic Rotational Motion Actuation and Control – Controlling rotational motion of a cylinder (one-dimensional) and sphere (two and three dimensional) over flat and curved surfaces. The ultimate goal is creating an active spherical joint.
Dynamic Immitation – Creating a robot that can imitate the dynamics of another vehicle in real time. The problem is simple when the workspace of both the robot and the vehicle are the same but when there are mismatches in the workspace of the vehicles the problem becomes one of optimization.
Mechanical Cognition – A novel concept for developing cognition in mechanical system, approaching the problem from the mechanical side of the problem instead of the traditional computer science approach. The idea is based on training a mechanical system to perform tasks when over-constrained to obtain better performance and adaptation ability when working under new unknown constrains
Jumping Biomimetic Robot – Design and Experimantal validation of a jumping robot mimicking the jumping mechanism of a grasshopper. The robot is in advanced stages, where capabilities such as stability, landing control and recovery from landing are under investigation.