INTRODUCTION: Brief History. Multifingered Hands and Dextrous Manipulation. Outline of the Book. Bibliography. RIGID BODY MOTION: Rigid Body Transformations. Rotational Motion in R3. Rigid Motion in R3. Velocity of a Rigid Body. Wrenches and Reciprocal Screws. MANIPULATOR KINEMATICS: Introduction. Forward Kinematics. Inverse Kinematics. The Manipulator Jacobian. Redundant and Parallel Manipulators. ROBOT DYNAMICS AND CONTROL: Introduction. Lagrange's Equations. Dynamics of Open-Chain Manipulators. Lyapunov Stability Theory. Position Control and Trajectory Tracking. Control of Constrained Manipulators. MULTIFINGERED HAND KINEMATICS: Introduction to Grasping. Grasp Statics. Force-Closure. Grasp Planning. Grasp Constraints. Rolling Contact Kinematics. HAND DYNAMICS AND CONTROL: Lagrange's Equations with Constraints. Robot Hand Dynamics. Redundant and Nonmanipulable Robot Systems. Kinematics and Statics of Tendon Actuation. Control of Robot Hands. NONHOLONOMIC BEHAVIOR IN ROBOTIC SYSTEMS: Introduction. Controllability and Frobenius' Theorem. Examples of Nonholonomic Systems. Structure of Nonholonomic Systems. NONHOLONOMIC MOTION PLANNING: Introduction. Steering Model Control Systems Using Sinusoids. General Methods for Steering. Dynamic Finger Repositioning. FUTURE PROSPECTS: Robots in Hazardous Environments. Medical Applications for Multifingered Hands. Robots on a Small Scale: Microrobotics. APPENDICES: Lie Groups and Robot Kinematics. A Mathematica Package for Screw Calculus. Bibliography. Index Each chapter also includes a Summary, Bibliography, and Exercises

http://www.cds.caltech.edu/%7Emurray/books/MLS/pdf/mls94-complete.pdf

A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation

Planning algorithms are impacting technical disciplines and industries around the world, including robotics, computer-aided design, manufacturing, computer graphics, aerospace applications, drug design, and protein folding. This coherent and comprehensive book unifies material from several sources, including robotics, control theory, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. The treatment is centered on robot motion planning but integrates material on planning in discrete spaces. A major part of the book is devoted to planning under uncertainty, including decision theory, Markov decision processes, and information spaces, which are the “configuration spaces” of all sensor-based planning problems. The last part of the book delves into planning under differential constraints that arise when automating the motions of virtually any mechanical system. Developed from courses taught by the author, the book is intended for students, engineers, and researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence, and control theory as well as computer graphics, algorithms, and computational biology.

Planning Algorithms: Introductory Material

A text that makes the mathematical underpinnings of robot motion accessible and relates low-level details of implementation to high-level algorithmic concepts. Robot motion planning has become a major focus of robotics. Research findings can be applied not only to robotics but to planning routes on circuit boards, directing digital actors in computer graphics, robot-assisted surgery and medicine, and in novel areas such as drug design and protein folding. This text reflects the great advances that have taken place in the last ten years, including sensor-based planning, probabalistic planning, localization and mapping, and motion planning for dynamic and nonholonomic systems. Its presentation makes the mathematical underpinnings of robot motion accessible to students of computer science and engineering, rleating low-level implementation details to high-level algorithmic concepts.

Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations

Methods for steering systems with nonholonomic c.onstraints between arbitrary configurations are investigated. Suboptimal trajectories are derived for systems that are not in canonical form. Systems in which it takes more than one level of bracketing to achieve controllability are considered. The trajectories use sinusoids at integrally related frequencies to achieve motion at a given bracketing level. A class of systems that can be steered using sinusoids (claimed systems) is defined. Conditions under which a class of two-input systems can be converted into this form are given. >

/pdf/nonholonomic-motion-planning-steering-using-sinusoids-3lyefe031n.pdf

Nonholonomic motion planning: steering using sinusoids

Continuum robotics has rapidly become a rich and diverse area of research, with many designs and applications demonstrated. Despite this diversity in form and purpose, there exists remarkable similarity in the fundamental simplified kinematic models that have been applied to continuum robots. However, this can easily be obscured, especially to a newcomer to the field, by the different applications, coordinate frame choices, and analytical formalisms employed. In this paper we review several modeling approaches in a common frame and notational convention, illustrating that for piecewise constant curvature, they produce identical results. This discussion elucidates what has been articulated in different ways by a number of researchers in the past several years, namely that constant-curvature kinematics can be considered as consisting of two separate submappings: one that is general and applies to all continuum robots, and another that is robot-specific. These mappings are then developed both for the single-section and for the multi-section case. Similarly, we discuss the decomposition of differential kinematics (the robotâ??s Jacobian) into robot-specific and robot-independent portions. The paper concludes with a perspective on several of the themes of current research that are shaping the future of continuum robotics.

/pdf/design-and-kinematic-modeling-of-constant-curvature-4wrx5stlzx.pdf

Design and Kinematic Modeling of Constant Curvature Continuum Robots: A Review

As we all know, singularity is commonly encountered in parallel mechanisms. It is shown that the behavior of singularity of parallel mechanisms could be more complicated than that of serial ones. However, it is not very clear whether singularity will bring problems to kinematics, dynamics or other characteristics and what result will be caused when parallel mechanisms fall into the neighborhood of a singularity. We focus on the study of the undesired effects of singularity in parallel mechanisms and propose a method to solve them, namely the method of redundancy. Three kinds of redundant methods are developed and their advantages are discussed. In the experiments, we concentrate on the control of redundantly actuated parallel mechanisms. We control the parallel mechanisms tracking a given trajectory by kinematic control method and dynamic control method respectively. Experimental results verified the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

Analysis and control of redundant parallel manipulators

Active variable stiffness (AVS) systems have been demonstrated to be effective in response control of buildings subjected to earthquake excitations Based on the theory of variable structure system (VSS) or sliding mode control (SMC), control methods for applications of AVS systems to seismic-excited buildings are presented In addition to full-state feedback controllers, general static output feedback controllers as well as special output feedback controllers using only collocated sensors are also presented Simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the control methods presented is remarkable, and that the performance of output feedback controllers is comparable to that of the full-state feedback controllers

Control of seismic-excited buildings using active variable stiffness systems

Parallel manipulators with redundant actuation present both problems and advantages. We analyze some major advantages of redundancy to demonstrate its usefulness. The dynamics of closed-chain mechanisms has been studied by many researchers. However, they often only consider the case of normal actuation. Few methods are suitable for closed-chain mechanisms with redundant actuation. In the article, the dynamic model of redundantly actuated closed-chain mechanisms is presented explicitly by applying Lagrange-D'Alembert formulations. As an illustrative example, the dynamic model of a 2-DOF planar parallel redundant manipulator is presented. A PID control algorithm in the joint space is experimentally implemented on this parallel manipulator to perform trajectory tracking. The experimental results show the validity of PID control.

Advantages and dynamics of parallel manipulators with redundant actuation

Kinematic design of parallel manipulators is addressed in this paper. By observation that regular (e.g., hyper-rectangular) workspaces are desirable for most machines, we propose the concept of effective regular workspace, which reflects both requirements on the workspace shape and quality. Dexterity index is utilized to characterize the effectiveness of the workspace. The optimal design problem is then formulated to find a manipulator geometry that maximizes the effective regular workspace. Since the optimal design problem is a constrained nonlinear optimization problem without explicit analytical expressions, the controlled random search (CRS) technique, which was reported robust and reliable, is applied to numerically solve the problem. The commonly-used Stewart-Gough platform is employed as an example to demonstrate the design procedure.

Optimal design of parallel manipulators for maximum effective regular workspace

Hybrid VTOL UAVs such as tail-sitters allow several key maneuvers such as vertical takeoff, landing, and hovering while at the same time maintaining superior aerodynamic efficiency at level flight. However, the large wing area of a tail-sitter at hovering makes it rather sensitive to the cross wind. In this letter, we present a disturbance observer (DOB) based control method to improve its hovering accuracy in presence of external disturbances such as cross wind. The presented DOB, operating on top of the aircraft baseline position controller, is designed in frequency domain using H
 ∞
 synthesis techniques and is guaranteed to stabilize the closed loop system with robustness to model uncertainties. In addition, it admits nonminimum phase system model, as the case of our tail-sitter platform, and does not require much hand tuning work on the Q-filter. Comparison study with existing UAV disturbance rejection method is conducted under different wind disturbances. Results show that the presented DOB control technique can effectively estimate various types of wind disturbances and lead to improved hovering accuracy of the tail-sitter UAV.

Zexiang Li

Papers

Analysis and control of redundant parallel manipulators

Control of seismic-excited buildings using active variable stiffness systems

Advantages and dynamics of parallel manipulators with redundant actuation

Optimal design of parallel manipulators for maximum effective regular workspace

Disturbance observer based hovering control of quadrotor tail-sitter VTOL UAVs using H ∞ synthesis