Development of a redundant anthropomorphic hydraulically actuated manipulator with a roll-pitch-yaw spherical wrist

The demand for redundant hydraulic manipulators that can implement complex heavy-duty tasks in unstructured areas is increasing; however, current manipulator layouts that remarkably differ from human arms make intuitive kinematic operation challenging to achieve. This study proposes a seven-degree-of-freedom (7-DOF) redundant anthropomorphic hydraulically actuated manipulator with a novel roll-pitch-yaw spherical wrist. A hybrid series-parallel mechanism is presented to achieve the spherical wrist design, which consists of two parallel linear hydraulic cylinders to drive the yaw/pitch 2-DOF wrist plate connected serially to the roll structure. Designed as a 1RPRRR-1SPU mechanism (“R”, “P”, “S”, and “U” denote revolute, prismatic, spherical, and universal joints, respectively; the underlined letter indicates the active joint), the 2-DOF parallel structure is partially decoupled to obtain simple forward/inverse kinematic solutions in which a closed-loop subchain “RPRR” is included. The 7-DOF manipulator is then designed, and its third joint axis goes through the spherical center to obtain closed-form inverse kinematic computation. The analytical inverse kinematic solution is drawn by constructing self-motion manifolds. Finally, a physical prototype is developed, and the kinematic analysis is validated via numerical simulation and test results.

Precise semi-analytical inverse kinematic solution for 7-DOF offset manipulator with arm angle optimization

Seven-degree-of-freedom redundant manipulators with link offset have many advantages, including obvious geometric significance and suitability for configuration control. Their configuration is similar to that of the experimental module manipulator (EMM) in the Chinese Space Station Remote Manipulator System. However, finding the analytical solution of an EMM on the basis of arm angle parameterization is difficult. This study proposes a high-precision, semi-analytical inverse method for EMMs. Firstly, the analytical inverse kinematic solution is established based on joint angle parameterization. Secondly, the analytical inverse kinematic solution for a non-offset spherical-roll-spherical (SRS) redundant manipulator is derived based on arm angle parameterization. The approximate solution of the EMM is calculated in accordance with the relationship between the joint angles of the EMM and the SRS manipulator. Thirdly, the error is corrected using a numerical method through the analytical inverse solution based on joint angle parameterization. After selecting the stride and termination condition, the precise inverse solution is computed for the EMM based on arm angle parameterization. Lastly, case solutions confirm that this method has high precision, and the arm angle parameterization method is superior to the joint angle parameterization method in terms of parameter selection.

Kinematic design of a translational parallel mechanism based on sub-kinematic chain determined workspace superposition

This paper presents the kinematic design of a translational parallel mechanism (PM) named Vari-Orthoglide by means of the workspace superposition, according to the sub-kinematic chain (SKC) based PM composition principle. The main topological characteristics of the manipulator with two SKCs under study, such as the position and orientation (POC) characteristics, degree of freedom (DOF) and coupling degree are analyzed, which turns out that the coupling degree equals to 1, implying the partially decoupled motion. With the topological characteristics based kinematic modeling principle, a symbolic model of the kinematics is established to derive its symbolic direct and inverse kinematic solutions. Based upon the direct kinematic solution, the workspaces for the two SKCs can be efficiently found. Moreover, the singularity loci are identified for finding the singularity-free workspace, where a regular workspace is fitted as the task workspace as expected. The presented work shows an approach to design translational parallel mechanisms considering motion decoupling and regular workspace, applicable to other types of parallel mechanisms.