Motion Control of a Hyper Redundant Manipulator Built by Serially Connecting Many Parallel Mechanism Units with a Few DOF

This paper describes the kinematic analysis and motion control of a hyper redundant robot built by serially connecting many units with a few DOF. Each unit of the manipulator is a spatial parallel mechanism with 3 DOF and is composed of 2 stages connected with 3 linear actuators, 7 spherical joints, and a center rod. The forward kinematic analysis of the manipulator based on the forward kinematics of each unit by numerical calculation was carried out. The inverse kinematic analysis, the iterative calculation so as to converge output error while output displacement is distributed into each unit with weighting coefficient, was proposed and formulated. Motion control of the robot was theoretically and experimentally examined based on the inverse kinematics. It was confirmed that a prototype with 3 units could generate the desired trajectories.