The Mihailo Pupin Institute is among the largest and most eminent research organizations in technical sciences in Yugoslavia. Founded in 1946 as the Telecommunications Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, it was given its present name 13 years later. In the Institute's early days the personnel, about one hundred employees, just a few of them researchers, has grown to more than 850 employees, 300 of them researchers, working in a 15,000 sq. meters modern research center.

A redundant robot manipulator has several certain or expected advantages over a nonredundant one. It is expected, among other capabilities, that the joints vary with constant velocities during the execution of those tasks which in a nonredundant manipulator require variable joint velocities. In this way, motion becomes more precise because of the elimination of errors associated with velocity change in joints. In this paper, it is shown that this expected advantage is not possible for all the joints, and that only as many joints as the degree of redundancy can have constant velocities.

In this paper, we investigate the crab gaits of a quadruped. Some important characteristics that simplify the analysis of crab gaits are presented, and several formulas for optimizing the longitudinal gait stability margin of a quadruped crab gait are derived by incorporating the time weighting factor. The analysis and implementation of the gait have been simplified by employing a pseudo-world coordinate frame as a reference frame for describing footholds and vehicle's motion. We also suggest a unique gait which optimizes gait stability margin according to the range of crab angle. Finally, we consider the effects of variations of footholds on stability and maximum permissible stroke in terms of support boundary angle. The results derived in this paper contain previous works on the forward walking gait as a special case of the crab gait.

Sufficient conditions are derived for the relative controllability of nonlinear perturbations of linear systems with distributed delays in control variable. The results are a generalization of previous results and are obtained by using Schauder's fixed point theorem.

The method of parametric optimization is applied to the energy analysis of the motion of three-link manipulators. The quality criterion is the energy consumption along 1 m of the path. It consists of two parts: 1) The sum of the products of joint moments and relative joint velocities (an equivalent of the mechanical work); 2) a quadratic form of joint velocities (an analogue of dissipation losses). Typical spatial motions are studied: the hand of the robot moves along a straight line from an initial position to another one, and returns to the start. Several velocity function shapes (parabolic, sinusoidal, and triangular), both symmetric and non-symmetric ones, are considered. The dependence of the energy consumption on the velocity form, on the trajectory parameters and on mechanical and geometrical characteristics of links is discussed.

Based on the Lyapunov theory, a new principle was developed for synthesizing robot tracking control in the presence of model uncertainties. First, a general Lyapunov-like robust tracking concept is presented. It is then used as a basis for the control algorithm derived via a quadratic Lyapunov function constructed using a sliding mode function (based on the output error). Control synthesis is made in task-space, without any need for solving the inverse kinematics problem, i.e. one does not need to inver the Jacobian matrix. It is also shown that the tracking error becomes close to zero in a settling time which is less than a prescribed finite time. Simulation results are incorporated.

This paper describes a project that addressed teaching a miniature robotic manipulator to play chess. This task was accomplished by interfacing a Microbot Minimover 5 robot and its Radio Shack TRS-80 control computer to a set of chessboard contacts and a Fidelity Electronics Chess Challenger 7 microcomputer. An extensive control program and interface circuitry were designed to enable each of the major components of the system to electronically communicate with one another.