Borrowing Some Ideas Fbom Biological Manipulators to Design an Artificial One

The design of robotic manipulators is a difficult question because most of the traditional disciplines needed for the design of robots, like kinematics and dynamics, are mostly analytic and have little synthetic power. We first discuss design seen as a generative process and suggest that analogr is a powerful design method. Then a spherical mechanism actuated in parallel with a large workspace that can be used to construct a complete limb is discussed. The design synthesis is performed by translating ideas borrowed from the design of biological manipulators.