The double universal joint robot wrist can eliminate singularities which limit the performance of existing industrial robot wrists. Unfortunately, this singularity-free wrist has an offset which prevents decoupling of the position and orientation in the manipulator inverse kinematics problem. Closed-form solutions are difficult, if not impossible, to find. This paper solves the inverse position...

In this paper we present a new, and extremely fast, algorithm for the inverse kinematics of discretely actuated manipulator arms with many degrees of freedom. Our only assumption is that the arm is macroscopicallyserial in structure,meaning that the overall structure is a serial cascade of units with each unit having either a serial or parallel kinematic structure. Our algorithm builds on previ...

Cooperating with heavy forging press, the heavy-duty forging manipulator is used for handling the workpiece during the free-forging process. Therefore, the size accuracy of the forgings is related to the dynamics performance of the forging manipulator. This paper aims to study the dynamic performance of DDS heavy-duty forging manipulator. The kinematics model is firstly built to predict the tra...

iii Summary In last few years, the demand for micro motion devices increases in many industrial applications; especially fields of assembling micro machines, manipulating biological cells, and micro-surgical operation. As a consequence, there is an urgent need to develop dexterous micro-manipulators. However, the field of manipulating microscopic objects places hard requirements on the design p...

Purpose – Slim and dexterous manipulators with long reaches can perform various exploration and inspection tasks in confined spaces. This paper aims to present the development of such a dexterous continuum manipulator for potential applications in the aviation industry. Design/methodology/approach – Benefiting from a newly conceived dual continuum mechanism and the improved actuation scheme, th...

This paper presents an obstacle avoidance method for discretely-actuated planar manipulators with a large number of serially connected modules. The method uses a direct combination of the manipulator workspace density functions and obstacle density maps to solve the inverse kinematics of the manipulator, thus avoiding the geometrical modelling of obstacles and the computation of the nearest poi...

| The inverse kinematics of serial manipulators is a central problem in the automatic control of robot manipula-tors. The main interest has been in inverse kinematics of a six revolute (6R) jointed manipulator with arbitrary geometry. It has been recently shown that the joints of a general 6R manipulator can orient themselves in 16 diierent con-gurations (at most), for a given pose of the end{e...

This paper discusses a general formulation both in kinematics and dynamics for under-actuated manipulator systems, represented by a freejoint manipulator, a free-floating manipulator, a flexible-base manipulator and a flexible-arm manipulator. We highlight the fact that a concept, originally developed for a particular system, is applicable to the others as well because the dynamic equations of ...