In part I of this paper (previous issue of Robotica) a dual stage system with the coarse and fine actuators is adopted to achieve sub-micron accuracy with a large working space for the proposed new three degree-of-freedom (DOF) miniaturized micro parallel mechanism with high mobility and one type of the architecture with vertical actuator locations in all three legs (C-VV type) among six possib...

1. Introduction. The idea of using global function fields for the construction of s-dimensional low-discrepancy sequences was first sketched by Niederreiter [9, Section 5], [10, Section 5], and the details were worked out in an improved form by Niederreiter and Xing [11]. In the method of [11] one chooses a suitable global function field which contains s elements satisfying special properties. ...

In the presence of unknown time-varying disturbances and input saturation, this paper develops a robust nonlinear control law for the dynamic positioning (DP) system of ships using a disturbance observer, an auxiliary dynamic system, and the dynamic surface control (DSC) technique. The disturbance observer is constructed to provide the estimates of unknown time-varying disturbances, the auxilia...

Recently, a number of variable impedance actuator designs have been proposed under different motivations (safe human-robot interaction, mechanical robustness and energy storing to cite a few). In a recent paper (Berret et al. (2011)) we observed that none of the available designs seem to reproduce an important characteristic of human muscles, i.e. the ability to open-loop reject disturbances by...

This paper presents the design of a selective-actuation flexure parallel mechanism that can provide three de-coupled micro-motions along the X-, Y and Z-axes. This mechanism can be used as an ultra-precision positioning system. The modeling of this flexure parallel mechanism is then established based on a pseudo-rigid-body model with consideration of deformation of the flexure member. The facto...

Power consumption and accuracy are main aspects to be taken into account in the movement executed by high performance robots. The first aspect is important from the economical point of view, while the second is requested to satisfy technical specifications. Aiming at increasing the robot performance, a strategy that maximizes the manipulator accuracy and minimizes the mechanical power consumpti...

Though outdoor navigation has been used for a long time, indoor navigation has not yet been put into practice. Recent works based on geomagnetic information require a user to follow the exact path of previous users, which limits its applicability. Meanwhile, the optimal navigation path may not be provided given a large number of paths with different sources and destinations. We present MeshMap,...