文档介绍：A Rapidly Deployable Manipulator System
Christiaan . Paredis, H. Benjamin Brown, Pradeep K. Khosla
Abstract:
A rapidly deployable manipulator bines the flexibility of reconfigurable modular hardware with modular programming tools, allowing the user to rapidly create a manipulator which is custom-tailored for a given task. This article describes two main aspects of such a system, namely, the Reconfigurable Modular Manipulator System (RMMS)hardware and the corresponding control software.
1 Introduction
Robot manipulators can be easily reprogrammed to perform different tasks, yet the range of tasks that can be performed by a manipulator is limited by , a manipulator well-suited for precise movement across the top of a table would probably no be capable of lifting heavy objects in the vertical direction. Therefore, to perform a given task,one needs to choose a manipulator with an appropriate mechanical structure.
We propose the concept of a rapidly deployable manipulator system to address the above mentioned ings of fixed configuration manipulators. As is illustrated in Figure 1, a rapidly deployable manipulator system consists of software and hardware that allow the user to rapidly build and program a manipulator which is customtailored for a given task.
The central building block of a rapidly deployable system is a Reconfigurable Modular Manipulator System (RMMS). The RMMS utilizes a stock of interchangeable link and joint modules of various sizes and performance specifications. One such module is shown in Figure 2. bining these general purpose modules, a wide range of special purpose manipulators can be assembled. Recently, there has been considerable interest in the idea of modular manipulators [2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 14], for research applications as well as for industrial applications. However, most of these systems lack the property of reconfigurability, which is key to the concept of rapidly deployable systems. The RMMS is