In this chapter we deal with the problem of robust position control for cooperative manipulators rigidly connected to an undeformable load. Design paradigms to solve force/position control problems have been established in the literature to improve the performance of the cooperation. In [8] a control strategy for cooperative manipulators was proposed based on the independence of the position an...

Parameter identification techniques are particularly attractive to determine the inertial parameters of robot manipulators and manipulated payloads. These parameters are particularly needed in implementation of a model-based controller for robot manipulators. In this paper, the inertial parameters of a manipulated rigid-body object have been estimated. The Newton-Euler equations will be employe...

A robotic system is kinematically redundant when it possesses more degrees of freedom than those required to execute a given task. This paper reviews the well-known methods used to find the inverse kinematics of redundant manipulators. Because redundant manipulators have infinite solutions for their inverse kinematics, therefore the conventional method that was used to calculate the inverse kin...

In this paper, the new concept of the dynamic singular configuration of flexible manipulators is proposed. When we control flexible manipulators using the inverse dynamics method, we need to consider this dynamic singular configuration of flexible manipulators. Without considering it, the control around the dynamic singular configuration may become unstable. As an example, we derive the dynamic...

This paper investigates the singular curves in the joint space of a family of planar parallel manipulators. It focuses on special points, referred to as cusp points, which may appear on these curves. Cusp points play an important role in the kinematic behavior of parallel manipulators since they make possible a nonsingular change of assembly mode. The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it...

Parallel manipulators which are singular with respect to the Schönflies motion group X(a) are called Schönflies-singular, or more precisely X(a)-singular, where a denotes the direction of the rotary axis. A special class of such manipulators are architecturally singular ones because they are singular with respect to any Schönflies group. Another remarkable set of Schönfliessingular planar paral...

The term discretely actuated hyperredundant manipulator is applied to a kind of manipulators which consists of serially connected modules. Such modules are composed of discretely actuated joints having finite stable states. Since the previous studies have rarely offered satisfactory results regarding the problem of inverse kinematics of discretely actuated hyper-redundant manipulators, the pres...

This paper investigates multiple wheeled mobile manipulators coordinating with each other under a collision avoidance situation. In our previous work we derived kinematic and dynamic maniuplability measures for multiple mobile manipulators transporting a common object. Main objective of this paper is to extend the previous approach to a system consisting of two mobile manipulators carrying a co...

Small perturbations can affect the kinematic properties of manipulators with non-generic architecture. We study in this paper the perturbations of symmetric planar 3-RPR manipulators. We show in particular that one can obtain any of the three possible stable types of behaviour of 3-RPR manipulators for large values of the lengths of the legs.

Many tasks which manipulators must perform occur in the presence of obstacles. While a variety of algorithms for nonredundant and mildly redundant manipulators exist, little analysis has been performed for a class of robots with the most to offer in the area of obstacle avoidance: hyper-redundant manipulators. The term ‘nyper-redundant” refers to redundant manipulators with a very large, possib...