In practice, clearances in the joints are inevitable due to tolerances, and defects arising from design and manufacturing. In the presence of clearance at a joint, a mechanism gains some additional, uncontrollable degrees of freedom which are the source of error. Moreover, joints undergo wear and backlashes and so cannot be used in precision mechanisms. In this study, the dynamic behaviour of ...

The subject of this paper is the design, control, and evaluation of a biped–climbing robot featuring a new hybrid hip joint. The hybrid hip provides both prismatic and revolute motion, discretely, to the robot, using a single actuator. This is intended to improve its adaptability in confined environments and its capability to maneuver over and around obstacles. Optimization of the hybrid hip jo...

In this study, the static stability of the grasp of a single planar object is analyzed using the potential energy method. Inprevious papers, we considered cases in which individual fingers were replaced by a multidimensional translational spring model, inwhich each finger is constructed with prismatic joints. Human hands and the most developed mechanical hands are constructed withre...

The subject of this paper is a special class of closedchain manipulators. First, we analyze a family of twodegree-of-freedom (dof) five-bar planar linkages. Two Jacobian matrices appear in the kinematic relations between the joint-rate and the Cartesian-velocity vectors, which are called the “inverse kinematics” and the “direct kinematics” matrices. It is shown that the loci of points of the wo...

This paper examines the problem of realizing a 6-DOF motion platform by proposing a closed loop kinematic architecture that benefits from an anthropological serial manipulator design. In contrast to standard motion platforms based on linear actuators, a mechanism with actuator design inspired from anthropological kinematic structure offers a relatively larger motion envelope and higher dexterit...

This paper presents a novel design for a mobile robot based on the kinematics of parallel mechanisms. The robot consists of 3 legs, each equipped with an asynchronous driving unit. The legs are connected to the driving units with spherical joints and to the upper plate with a revolute joint. Three additional encoders, attached to the upper revolute joints provide redundant data. This data is us...

Revolute joints are frequently used in articulated structures. Traditionally, such a joint is formed by assembling two components. As an alternative, revolute joints can be created inside the mold using an in-mold assembly process. This process eliminates the need for post-molding assembly, thus significantly reducing the cycle time and part count. The functional performance of a revolute joint...