Power consumption and accuracy are main aspects to be taken into account in the movement executed by high performance robots. The first aspect is important from the economical point of view, while the second is requested to satisfy technical specifications. Aiming at increasing the robot performance, a strategy that maximizes the manipulator accuracy and minimizes the mechanical power consumpti...

Kinematic redundancy of a pair of manipulator-task can be classified into intrinsic and functional redundancies. This paper compares two different approaches to solve the inverse kinematics of functionally-redundant serial manipulators. First, the augmented approach add a virtual joint to the manipulator in order to render the Jacobian matrice underdetermined and project a secondary task onto t...

A novel 3RPS-3SPR serial-parallel manipulator (S-PM) with 6 degree of freedoms (DOFs) is proposed in this paper. It includes a lower 3RPS parallel manipulator (PM) and an upper 3SPR PM. Its inverse kinematics, active forces and workspace are solved. First, the inverse displacement is solved in close form based on the geometrical and the dimensional constraints of this S-PM. Second, the 9×9 and ...

The aim of this paper is to classify one family of 3R serial positioning manipulators. This categorization is based on the number of cusp points of quaternary, binary, generic and non-generic manipulators. It was found three subsets of manipulators with 0, 2 or 4 cusp points and one homotopy class for generic quaternary manipulators. This classification allows us to define the design parameters...

This paper illustrates an application of intelligent control for a planar 3-RRR parallel manipulator. Unlike control of serial manipulators that has been vastly addressed in scientific literature, control of parallel manipulators has been only addressed by few. A GA optimized bi-level tuning fuzzy PD controller is designed here to control the manipulator. In order to consider the maximum allowa...

Model based error compensation of a robotic manipulator, also known as robot calibration, requires the identification of its generalized errors. These errors are found from measured data and used to predict, and compensate for, the end-point errors as a function of configuration. However, the generalized error formulation introduces redundant parameters, often nonintuitive, that may compromise ...

The paper presents a methodology to enhance the stiffness analysis of serial and parallel manipulators with passive joints. It directly takes into account the loading influence on the manipulator configuration and, consequently, on its Jacobians and Hessians. The main contributions of this paper are the introduction of a non-linear stiffness model for the manipulators with passive joints, a rel...