Intelligent motion task planning of redundant parallel manipulator

In this study, a robot that utilizes a parallel mechanism at parts of its body is proposed. The robot combines locomotion and manipulation, and consists mainly of four units of three degree of freedom (hereafter called DOF) parallel mechanism with linear actuators and two grippers attached to both sides of its body. The robot has high redundancy with 14-DOF without grippers. The purpose of this study is to realize the "intelligent motion" in the redundant parallel manipulator that performs the basic motion of the proposed robot. The robot determines its motion while considering its redundancy and improves it using actuator information derived from the motion. First, we analyze the kinematics and statics about the parallel manipulator, and show a method to optimize the solution of inverse kinematics that includes the redundancy problem. Next, we discuss the intelligent motion task planning of the parallel manipulator using actuator information. Two methods are proposed based on the optimization of inverse kinematics. One optimizes the motion by iteration. The other optimizes the motion successively in continuous motion tasks. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed methods is verified experimentally.