Abstract
In this paper, a mask-panel alignment robot system is considered for IT industry applications. Two kinds of solutions are suggested which are required in constructing a control system for the alignment robot with actuation redundancy. First, the kinematic solution for the 4PPR parallel positioning mechanism is formulated for an arbitrary initial posture, which relates the mask-panel misalignment in the task space and the desired actuator displacements in the joint space. Secondly, in order to increase the stiffness of the control motion and also to avoid the mechanical lock which may happen due to the redundant actuation, a new synchronous control method is proposed which has the merit of coordinating joint control motions while not losing individual joint control performance. In addition, the engineering process to develop a visual alignment robot system is described with the results of experimental setup and GUI software. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed alignment system control methodology and how much beneficial it will be in real industrial applications.