A global optimal control algorithm was developed with the aim of finding a control which satisfies some special requirements in the sense of obtaining singular position free movement of the redundant robot mechanism. The solution of the developed global optimal control algorithm is a boundary value problem. The additional constraints in the boundary value problem were constructed with the use of an optimization process. The usefulness of the developed global optimal control algorithm is demonstrated by the example of the 3 DOFs planar redundant robot mechanism of SCARA type.

In the field of robotic applications based on the coordinated motion of two manipulators, it seems that very few control schemes work efficiently. The best way to achieve the simultaneous control of object trajectory and forces applied to it, is to implement control schemes that are extended versions of one arm hybrid force'position control. The aim of this paper is not to review all existing solutions but rather to analyze and compare them from simulation results with a new solution presented here. The control scheme is an application of the one arm hybrid external control that we had previously developed. The main results of this theory are summarized in this paper. This radically new approach for a cooperation task has some advantages compared to other methods mentioned in this paper.

In this paper, a very inexpensive, lightweight and simple wrist mechanism is introduced. This wrist displays nonlinear torsional vibrations. This differs from conventional wrists in that structural flexibility in the mechanism is allowed to occur by design. In this paper, the dynamic equations of this wrist are derived. System identification techniques are then employed to obtain a linearized model. Various control strategies are studied. It is shown that the input-output feedback linearization technique is not feasible for these nonlinear dynamic equations. It is also shown that the use of conventional rigid body PID controllers on this proto-type is inadequate. A tracking controller which compensates for the flexible dynamics of the wrist is implemented with encouraging results. This controller allows the end-effector to be placed at an arbitrary orientation with little vibration. The effect of the controller is to make the wrist appear to have a much higher structural stiffness. The compliant nature of this wrist allows simple force control strategies to be implemented. It is the combination of the wrist with the control algorithm which makes this design viable.

Force control of walking machines is essential in a natural soft and uneven terrain. A load adaptive PI force control method for the hydraulic actuation system of MECANT I has been developed. The I term of the controller is changed according to the desired load. Force control satisfies the support requirement also when a leg penetrates the terrain. A method to distribute support forces in an optimal manner has been developed. A rule based altitude controller and a dead-zone and saturation based attitude controller calculates the desired body forces. Walking tests on uneven wet sand fields show the useful applicability of the method.

This paper presents an active visual method for determining the 3-D pose of a flexible object with a hand-eye system. Some simple and effective on-line algorithms to overcome various exceptional situations in chaincoding or determine the object pose more precisely are developed. The pose of a flexible object can be easily changed because of the flexible nature and the prediction of the pose is almost impossible. A new sensing pose is computed by using the image coordinates of the points on the border line of an image window and the current pose of a hand-eye system for the cases that the flexible object is extended outside the window. In a case of exceptional overlapping, a new sensing pose is computed by using the image coordinates of four extreme image points and the current pose of the hand-eye system. Through a chaincoding process on the skeletonized images, the stereo matching problem of two images is transformed into the matching of the curvature representations of the two skeletonized images. The 3-D pose of a flexible object is computed by using the results of this matching and the camera and hand-eye parameters calibrated beforehand. The initial sensing results are used in computing a new sensing pose to determine the object more precisely.

Due to the essential development of different means of numerical computation in the last years, new prospects have been opened for realization of different advanced control methods as conventional reasoning, fuzzy rule or ANN-based AI controls. However, it can clearly be seen, that each of these methods have significant technological limits making it expedient to seek compromises between the application of such methods and certain particular hardware solutions designed for a concrete problem. The aim of this paper is to show that in quite wide a range of practically important control tasks appropriate hardware solutions can be elaborated and combined with the above methods.

A new type of microrobot is described. Its simple and compact design is believed to be of promise in the microrobotics field. Stepping motion allows speeds up to 4mm/s. Resolution smaller than 10 nm is achievable. Experiments in an open-loop motion demonstrated a repeatability better than 50µm on a 10 mm displacement at an average speed of 0.25 mm/s. A position feedback based on a microvision system will be developed in order to achieve a submicron absolute position accuracy.

Many motion planning methods use Configuration Space to represent a robot manipulator's range of motion and the obstacles which exist in its environment. The Cartesian to Configuration Space mapping is computationally intensive and this paper describes how the execution time can be decreased by using parallel processing. The natural tree structure of the algorithm is exploited to partition the computation into parallel tasks. An implementation programmed in the occam2 parallel computer language running on a network of INMOS transputers is described. The benefits of dynamically scheduling the tasks onto the processors are explained and verified by means of measured execution times on various processor network topologies. It is concluded that excellent speed-up and efficiency can be achieved provided that proper account is taken of the variable task lengths in the computation.

This paper presents a study of the dynamics of undersea robot manipulators in an unstructured sea water environment and a control scheme appropriate for manipulating them. Under the sea, the buoyancy and the added mass should be considered in modeling the dynamics of the robot manipulators. However, due to the complexity of the modeling of the added mass, the dynamics of the robot manipulators are treated as an unmodeled dynamics in this paper. In addition to the buoyancy and added mass/moment of inertia, disturbing forces due to drag, and current affecting the dynamics of the robot manipulators should be considered. In this paper, the forces due to the drag are defined as disturbance forces in addition to the frictional force of manipulator joints. In order to control the manipulator, a robust control scheme is devised to achieve trajectory tracking while regulating disturbance forces. A numerical example is shown.

Part I of this paper was concerned with kinematic workspaces of walking machines, while this paper addresses the static workspaces of a walking machine and their graphical representation. The results of static analysis are presented; the static workspace constraints are established; an algorithm for investigation of static workspaces is presented; and the position static workspaces are analysed and graphically represented for an example walking machine design.

The paper focuses on the problem of trajectory planning of multiple coordinating robots. When multiple robots collaborate to manipulate one object, a redundant system is formed. There are a number of trajectories that the system can follow. These can be described in Cartesian coordinate space by an nth order polynomial. This paper presents an optimisation method based on the Genetic Algorithms (GAs) which chooses the parameters of the polynomial, such that the execution time and the drive torques for the robot joints are minimized. With the robot's dynamic constraints taken into account, the pitimised trajectories are realisable. A case study with two planar-moving robots, each having three degrees of freedom, shows that the method is effective.

Local torque minimization for redundant manipulators has been considered by using a redundancy resolution approach. Since its initial formulation, however, proposed solutions have been plagued by performance instabilities. Till now, the reason was not clear. In this paper it is shown that the instability problem occurred because of incorrect formulation. A correct formulation is proposed, which is used to analyze the reason for instability. Special attention is paid to joint acceleration terms at the selfmotion manifold. This helps explaining the recent formulation of a stable scheme based on local joint velocity minimization in terms of torque. The results obtained. are related to dynamic redundancy resolution in general.