• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.999-1010
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• 2003

Uninterrupted power supply has become indispensable during the maintenance task of active electric power lines as a result of today's highly information-oriented society and increasing demand of electric utilities. This maintenance task has the risk of electric shock and the danger of falling from high place. Therefore it is necessary to realize an autonomous robot system using electro-hydraulic manipulators because hydraulic manipulators have the advantage of electric insulation and power/mass density. Meanwhile an electro-hydraulic manipulator using hydraulic actuators has many nonlinear elements, and its parameter fluctuations are greater than those of an electrically driven manipulator. So it is relatively difficult to realize not only stable contact work but also accurate force control for the autonomous assembly tasks using hydraulic manipulators. In this paper, the robust force control of a 6-link electro-hydraulic manipulator system used in the real maintenance task of active electric lines is examined in detail. A nominal model for the system is obtained from experimental frequency responses of the system, and the deviation of the manipulator system from the nominal model is derived by a multiplicative uncertainty. Robust disturbance observers for force control are designed using this information in an H$\_$$\infty$/ framework, and implemented on the two different setups. Experimental results show that highly robust force tracking by a 6-link electro-hydraulic manipulator could be achieved even if the stiffness of environment and the shape of wall change.

• Journal of KSNVE
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.187-196
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• 1996

A new control strategy to actively control the vibration of a very flexible single link manipulator is proposed and experimentally realized. The control scheme consists of two actuators; a motor mounted at the beam hub and a piezoceramic bonded to the surface of the flexible link. The control torque of the motor to produce a desired angular motion is firstly determined by employing a sliding mode control theory on the equivalent rigid dynamics. The torque is then applied to the flexible manipulator in order to activate the commanded motion. During the motion, underirable oscillation is actively suppressed by applying a feedback control voltage to the piezoceramic actuator. Consequently, the desired tip position is favorably accomplished without vibration. Measured control responses are presented in order to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed control methodology.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.189-195
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• 2000

For free motions, vibration suppression of flexible manipulators has been one of the hottest research topics. However, for constrained motions, a little effort has been devoted for vibration suppression control. Using the dependency of elastic deflections of links on contact force under static conditions, vibrations for constrained planar two-link flexible manipulators have been suppressed successfully by controlling the contact force. However, for constrained spatial multi-link flexible manipulators, the vibrations cannot be suppressed by only controlling the contact force. So, the aim of this paper is to clarify the vibration mechanism of a constrained, multi-DOF, flexible manipulator and to devise the suppression method. We apply a concise hybrid position/force control scheme to control a flexible manipulator modeled by lumped-parameter modeling method. Finally, a comparison between simulation and experimental results is presented to show the performance of our method.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2003.11c
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• pp.657-660
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• 2003

Control of multi-link robot arms is a very difficult problem because of the highly nonlinear dynamics. Decentralized control scheme is developed for control of robot manipulators based on RBF(Radial Basis Function) Neural Networks. RBF Neural Networks is used to approximate the coupling forces among the joints, coriolis force, centrifugal force, gravitational force, and frictional force. The compensation controller is also proposed to estimate the bound of approximation error so that the chattering effect of the control effort can be reduced. The proposed scheme does not require an accurate manipulator dynamic, and it is proved that closed-loop system is asymptotic stable despite the gross robot parameter variations. Numerical simulations for two-link robot manipulator are included to show the effectiveness of controller.

• Journal of Animal Environmental Science
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.179-186
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was kinematics analysis of the multi-joint robot manipulator for an automatic milking system. The multi-joint robot manipulator was consisted of one perpendicular link and four revolution links to attach simultaneously four teat cups to four teats of a milking cow. The local coordinates of each joints on the robot manipulator was given for kinematics analysis. The transformation of manipulator was able to be given by kinematics using Denavit-Hatenberg parameters. The value of inverse kinematics which was solved by two geometric solution methods. The kinematics solutions was verified by AutoCAD, MATLAB, simulation program was developed using Visual C++.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.32B no.5
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• pp.777-787
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• 1995

This paper presents a new method for automatically calibrating robot link (Kinematic) parameters during the process of estimating motion parameters of a moving object. The motion estimation is performed based on stereo cameras mounted on the end-effector of a robot manipulator. This approach significantly differs from other calibration approaches in that the calibration is achieved by simply observing the motion of the moving object (without resorting to any other external calibrating tools) at numerous and widely varying joint-angle configurations. A differential error model, which expresses the measurement errors of a robot in terms of robot link parameter errors and motion parameters, is developed. And then a measurement equation representing the true measurement values is derived. By estimating the above two kinds of parameters minimizing the difference between the measurement equations and the true moving pattern, the calibration of the robot link parameters and the estimation of the motion parameters are accomplished at the same time.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.360-371
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• 1998

In this paper, output precision characteristics of a planar 6 degree-of-freedom parallel mechanisms are investigated, where the 6 degree-of-freedom mechanism is formed by adding an additional link along with an actuated joint in each serial subchain of the planar 3 degree-of-freedom parallel mechanism. Kinematic analysis for the parallel mechanism is performed, and its first-order kinematic characteristics are examined via kinematic isotropic index, maximum and minimum input-output velocity transmission ratios of the mechanisms. Based on this analysis, two types of planar 6 degrees-of-freedom parallel manipulators are selected. Then, dynamic characteristics of the two selected planar 6 degree-of-freedom parallel mechanisms, via Frobenius norms of inertia matrix and power modeling array, are investigated to compare the magnitudes of required control efforts of both three large actuators and three small actuators when the link lengths of three additional links are changed. It can be concluded from the analysis results that each of these two planar 6 degrees-of-freedom parallel mechanisms has an excellent control-in-the-small characteristics and therefore, it can be very effectively employed as a high-precision macro-micro manipulator when both its link lengths and locations of small and large actuators are properly chosen.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.168-177
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• 2007

In a number of fields, robots are being used for two purposes: efficiency and safety. Most robots, however, have single-actuator mechanism for each joint, where the tasks are performed with high stiffness. High stiffness causes undesired problems to the environment and robots. This study proposes redundant actuator mechanism as an alternative idea to cope with these problems. In this paper, Double-Actuator Unit (DAU) is implemented at each joint for applications of multi-link manipulators. The DAU is composed of two motors: the positioning actuator and the stiffness modulator, which enables independent control of positioning and compliance. A three-link manipulator with DAUs enables adaptive control of RCC. By modulating the joint stiffness of the manipulator and controlling the position of RCC, we can significantly reduce contact force during assembly tasks and surgical procedures.

• Proceedings of the Korea Committee for Ocean Resources and Engineering Conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.204-209
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• 2004

This paper describes dynamic manipulability analysis of robotic arms moving in viscous fluid. The Manipulability is a functionality of manipulator system in a given configuration and under the limits of joint ability with respect to the tasks required to bt performed. To investigate the manipulability of underwater robotic arms, a modeling and analysis method are presented. The dynamic equation of motion of underwater manipulator is derived from the Lagrange - Euler equation considering with the hydraulic forces caused by added mass, buoyancy and hydraulic drag. The hydraulic drag term in the equation: is established as analytical form using Denavit - Hartenberg (D-H) link coordination of manipulator. Two analytical approaches based on Manipulability Ellipsoid are presented to visualize the manipulability of robotic arm moving in viscous fluid. The one is scaled ellipsoid which transforms the boundary of joint torque to acceleration boundary of end-effector by normalizing the torque in joint space while the other is shifted ellipsoid which depicts total acceleration boundary of end-effector by shifting the ellipsoid in work space. An analysis example of 2-link manipulator with proposed analysis scheme is presented to validate the method.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.11 no.8
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• pp.688-695
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• 2005

This paper describes dynamic manipulability analysis of robotic arms moving in viscous fluid. The manipulability is a functionality of manipulator system in a given configuration under the limits of joint ability with respect to the task required to be performed. To investigate the manipulability of underwater robotic arms, a modeling and analysis method is presented. The dynamic equation of motion of underwater manipulator is derived based on the Lagrange-Euler equation considering with the hydrodynamic forces caused by added mass, buoyancy and hydraulic drag. The hydrodynamic drag term in the equation is established as analytical form using Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) link coordination of manipulator. Two analytical approaches based oil manipulability ellipsoid are presented to visualize the manipulability of robotic arm moving in viscous fluid. The one is scaled ellipsoid which transforms the boundary of joint torque to acceleration boundary of end-effector by normalizing the torques in joint space, while the other is shifted ellipsoid which depicts total acceleration boundary of end-effector by shifting the ellipsoid as much as gravity and velocity dependent forces in work space. An analysis example of 2-link manipulator with proposed analysis scheme is presented to validate the method.