In humans, maintaining body posture is a basis for many activities such as standing, walking or reaching. Human posture control involves multi-sensory integration mainly of joint angle, joint torque, vestibular and visual inputs. This integration provides humans with high flexibility and with robustness in terms of failsafety. Roboticists may draw inspirations from the human control methods whe...

A new method for kinematic calibration of a robot is presented, based on triaxial measurement of acceleration by a sensor xed to the robot end-point. The kinematic parameters are evaluated by means of a series of simple tests (two for each joint). In these tests each joint, except the one under consideration, is kept xed. Acceleration and encoder output are then acquired. Simulations and experi...

A family of reconfigurable parallel robots can change motion modes by passing through constraint singularities by locking and releasing some passive joints of the robot. This paper is about the kinematics, the workspace and singularity analysis of a 3-PRPiR parallel robot involving lockable Pi and R (revolute) joints. Here a Pi joint may act as a 1-DOF planar parallelogram if its lockable P (pr...

this paper proposes a gait planning approach to reduce the required friction for a biped robot walking on various surfaces. to this end, a humanoid robot with 18 dof is considered to develop a dynamics model for studying various 3d manoeuvres. then, feasible trajectories are developed to alleviate the fluctuations on the upper body to resemble human-like walking. in order to generate feasible w...

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...

This paper presents a design procedure for a reduced-order observer-based controller dedicated to n-joint robot manipulators. It is assumed that only the joint angular positions are measured. The joint angular velocities are estimated via an exponential reduced-order observer. Two types of control laws based on this observer are studied: point-to-point control with gravity compensation and traj...

Hybrid position/force control enables a robot to apply specified forces to a constraint while moving along a prescribed path. Flexibility of the motor transmissions (joint flexibility) is a major concern in the design of hybrid controls, particularly with regard to system stability. While much work on hybrid control has been toward the development of advanced schemes specifically for flexible-j...

Modelling and identification of flexible-joint robots is required for dynamic simulation and model based control of industrial robots. A nonlinear finite element based method is used to derive the dynamic equations of motion in a form suitable for both simulation and identification. The latter requires that the equations of motion are linear in the dynamic parameters. For accurate simulations o...

A Personal robot, which is expected to become popular in the future, is required to be active in joint work and community life with humans. Therefore, the purpose of this study is the development of new mechanisms and functions for a humanoid robot that has the ability to express human-like emotion and communicate naturally with a human, in order to realize a personal robot. Recently, the Emoti...

A new approach based on interval analysis is developed to find the global minimum-jerk (MJ) trajectory of a robot manipulator within a joint space scheme using cubic splines. MJ trajectories are desirable for their similarity to human joint movements and for their amenability to path tracking and to limit robot vibrations. This makes them attractive choices for robotic applications, in spite of...