In this article, an experimental calibration of the constraining linkage of a wire-actuated parallel robot is discussed. The experimental test bed includes a prototyped 4 degrees of freedom wire-actuated parallel manipulator and an optical tracking system. The parallel manipulator employs hybrid actuation ofjoints and wires and includes a rigid branch to constrain the motion of its mobile platf...

This paper applies dimensional synthesis to explore the geometric design of dexterous three-fingered robotic hands for maximizing precision manipulation workspace, in which the hand stably moves an object with respect to the palm of the hand, with contacts only on the fingertips. We focus primarily on the tripod grasp, which is the most commonly used grasp for precision manipulation. We systema...

We discuss a physical implementation of the Crystalline robot system. Crystalline robots consist of modules that can aggregate together to form distributed robot systems. Crystalline modules are actuated by expanding and contracting each unit. This actuation mechanism permits automated shape metamorphosis. We describe the Crystalline module concept and a physical implementation of a robot syste...

We present a mathematical model for the dynamics of an electrostatically actuated microcantilever. For the common case of cantilevers excited by a periodic voltage, we show that the underlying linearized dynamics are those of a periodic system described by a Mathieu equation. We present experimental results that confirm the validity of the model, and in particular, illustrate that parametric re...

Whilst the necessity of finding an intelligent-based controlling method for a two-leg walking robot increases, the balance of the under-actuated leg consisting of two links is emphasized in this study. This is not only a nonlinear structure, but also a single-input double-output system. However, the problem becomes concrete through the proposed diagonal recurrent neural networks (DRNN) method. ...

This work proposes a new method for simultaneous probabilistic identification and control of an observable, fully-actuated mechanical system. Identification is achieved by conditioning stochastic process priors on observations of configurations and noisy estimates of configuration derivatives. In contrast to previous work that has used stochastic processes for identification, we leverage the st...