A new approach to control an omnidirectional mobile manipulator is developed. The robot is considered to be an individual agent aimed at performing robotic tasks described in terms of a displacement and a force interaction with the environment. A reactive architecture and impedance control are used to ensure reliable task execution in response to environment stimuli. The mechanical structure of...

The Engineering Test Satellite VII (ETS-VII), an unmanned spacecraft equipped with a 2-m long, six-degree-of-freedom manipulator arm, was developed and launched by the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA). ETS-VII has successfully carried out a variety of on-board experiments with its manipulator arm, and these key technologies are essential for an orbital free-flying robot. These...

This thesis presents the design and control of a small aerial manipulator operating in indoor environments. The critical challenges of functioning effectively in such environments are (i) maximizing workspace in constrained spaces like narrow corridors or tight corners, and (ii) achieving stable flight when carrying payloads of unknown mass in the presence of uncertainties. While aerial manipul...

The Manipulator Emulator Testbed (MET) is to provide a facility capable of hosting the simulation of various manipulator configurations to support concept studies, evaluation, and other engineering development activities. Specifically, the testbed is intended to support development of the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) and related systems. The MET is required to permit that com...

The explicit, non-recursive symbolic form of the dynamic model of robotic manipulators with compliant links and joints are developed based on Lagrangianassumed modes formulation. This form of dynamic model is suitable for controller synthesis, as well as accurate simulations of robotic applications. The final form of the equations are organized in a form similar to rigid manipulator equations. ...

This paper presents the complete dynamic model of a new six degrees of freedom (DOF) spatial 3-RPRS parallel manipulator. The geometry parameters of the manipulator are optimized for a given constant orientation workspace. Further, a robust task-space trajectory tracking control is also designed for the manipulator along with a nonlinear disturbance observer. To demonstrate the efficacy and sho...

Aerial manipulators may replace industrial for specific tasks involving large workspaces and high dynamics. However, these robots suffer from a lack of accuracy, autonomy, payload capability complex regulatory environment. To overcome some limitations, we introduce novel aerial manipulator suspended by spring to robotic carrier. A computed torque controller with exteroceptive feedback is used c...

In this paper, a nonlinear adaptive neural network tracking control with a guaranteed H∞ performance is proposed for a constrained robot manipulator with plant uncertainties. The neural network is used to learn the unknown dynamics by an adaptive algorithm. Moreover, a force sensor is built to measure the forces and torques between the experimental robot UArm II end-effector and the environment...

The authors propose a method of controlling the position of a manipulator with passive joints which have holding brakes instead of actuators. In this method, the coupling characteristics of manipulator dynamics are used, and no additional mechanisms are required. In this paper, the effectiveness of the method is verified by experiments using a prototype manipulator. The prototype is a two degre...

This paper deals with the problem of robust trajectory tracking control, with a guaranteedH∞ performance, for free-floating manipulator systems. A control strategy is developed based on the robot mathematical model and a fuzzy adaptive approach. The dynamic model of the free-floating space manipulator is described via the Dynamically Equivalent Manipulator approach. The fuzzy adaptive control l...