The paper presents a method of motion planning for a mobile manipulator acting as a helper providing the necessary tools or a surgery assistant carrying out pre-planned procedures. Mobility of this system makes it possible to reach the position which will give optimal access to the operating field. The path of the end-effector, determined during operation pre-planning, is defined as a curve par...

This paper considers the design of a motion planner that will simultaneously accomplish control and motion planning of a n-link nonholonomic mobile manipulator, wherein, a n-link holonomic manipulator is coupled with a nonholonomic mobile platform, within an obstacle-ridden environment. This planner, derived from the Lyapunov-based control scheme, generates collision-free trajectories from an i...

In this article, an experimental calibration of the constraining linkage of a wire-actuated parallel robot is discussed. The experimental test bed includes a prototyped 4 degrees of freedom wire-actuated parallel manipulator and an optical tracking system. The parallel manipulator employs hybrid actuation ofjoints and wires and includes a rigid branch to constrain the motion of its mobile platf...

We present a new Bayesian policy search algorithm suitable for problems with policy-dependent cost variance, a property present in many robot control tasks. We extend recent work on variational heteroscedastic Gaussian processes to the optimization case to achieve efficient minimization of very noisy cost signals. In contrast to most policy search algorithms, our method explicitly models the co...

In this paper, a flexible robotic assembly system with decentralized architecture is presented. The system is designed to achieve high reconfigurability so that it can adapt to changes in manufacturing environment; a new robot can be easily installed to the system and execute assembly tasks immediately, together with other devices. For easier reconfiguration, a semi-automated calibration method...

Abstract The dynamics for multi-link spatial flexible manipulator arms is investigated. The system considered here is an N-flexible-link manipulator driven by N DC-motors through N revolute flexiblejoints. The flexibility of each flexible joint is modeled as a linearly elastic torsional spring, and the mass of the joint is also considered. For the flexibility of the link, all of the stretching ...

This paper introduces the basis of a graphical software application, designed for low cost hardware, as a general, flexible and open platform to work on robotics. VirtualRobot has proven to be a useful tool in many fields of robotics, such as manipulator programming, mobile robots control (wheeled, sub-aquatic and walking robots), distance computation, sensor simulation, collision detection, mo...

This technical note deals with the way of organizing the work of a manipulator on a mobile robot. Every robotic mission is composed of several navigation and manipulation operations. In this research, the robot arm actions have been sequenced, once the mobile robot has stopped, with the help of the graphical specification tool Grafcet. The proposed method has been successfully implemented in th...

This work presents the development of mathematical model of a mobile manipulator and its use to develop a controller based on backstepping nonlinear control and the computed torque control law. This MIMO nonlinear controller was implemented on the Robot Operating System (ROS) environment. The mobile robot is based on the Barrett WAM (Whole Arm Manipulator) and a custom build mobile platform. Th...

In this paper, a NCGPC (Nonlinear Continuous Time Generalized Predictive Control) is proposed for a single-link flexible joint manipulator. This control is developed by using a property of NCGPC, the demonstration that the selection of particular design parameters, such as control order and predictor order leads to well-known feedback linearization. Simulations are presented in order to illustr...