The large number of mechanical degrees of freedom of the hand is not fully exploited during actual movements such as grasping. Usually, angular movements in various joints tend to be coupled, and EMG activities in different hand muscles tend to be correlated. The occurrence of covariation in the former was termed kinematic synergies, in the latter muscle synergies. This study addresses two ques...

A modular parallel robotic system consists of a collection of individual standard units that can be assembled into various robot configurations for a diversity of task requirements. This paper is focused on the design and kinematic analysis of modular reconfigurable parallel robots. A set of fundamental modules is considered. A local frame representation of the ProductOfExponentials (POE) formu...

This paper describes a framework and algorithms for robust kinematic design of mechanical assemblies. The framework, developed over a period of ten years, is based on the configuration space method and supports automatic modeling, nominal and toleranced analysis, and part tolerance envelope computation of open and closed loop planar mechanisms with multiple, changing contacts. It also supports ...

Kinematic position analysis is the first step in creating a complete mathematical model of the new manipulator architecture. This analysis will begin by developing a general descriptive model that characterizes the kinematic geometry of the device. From this geometric model, a mathematical function relating the input-to-output position parameters will be formed. The goal of this function is to ...

This study investigated the effect of obstacles of different heights on the locomotion of 15 healthy subjects. The following parameters were studied: (1) the distance of the toe and heel markers from the obstacle during toe-off and heel contact, respectively, (2) the minimum clearance distance of the toe and heel markers, and (3) the angular displacements and velocities of the hip, knee, and an...

In this paper, we introduce a new general method for kinematic analysis of rigid multi body systems subject to holonomic constraints. The method extends the standard analysis of kinematically determinate rigid multi body systems to the over-determinate case. This is accomplished by introducing a constrained optimisation problem with the objective function given as a function of the set of syste...

The kinematics of the reach-to-grasp movement were analyzed in ten healthy children (age 6-7 years) under different experimental conditions: distance and size of the target objects, and visual feedback during the reach were varied in a within-subjects design. To assess age-related differences, the same experiments were performed in ten healthy adults. The experimental set-up was scaled accordin...

This paper presents a general kinematic analysis method for complex gear mechanisms. This approach involves the null-space of the adjacency matrix associated with the graph of the mechanism weighted by complex coefficients. It allows to compute the rotational speed ratios of all the links and the frequency of all the contacts in this mechanism (including roll bearings). This approach is applied...

In the present paper, an attempt has been made to carry out kinematic and dynamic analysis of a six-legged robot. A three-revolute (3R) kinematic chain has been chosen for each leg mechanism in order to mimic the leg structure of an insect. Denavit–Hartenberg (D-H) conventions are used to perform kinematic analysis of the six-legged robot. The direct and inverse kinematic analysis for each leg ...