CAREER: New Research Directions for Parallel Manipulators -- Investigation of Redundant Actuation, Redundant Sensing and Static Balancing

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Imme Ebert-Uphoff, Georgia Institute of Technology, 9984279CAREER: New Research Directions for Parallel Manipulators -Investigation of Redundant Actuation, Redundant Sensing andStatic BalancingToday's manufacturing industry faces many challenges in terms of accuracy, throughput and flexibility of the production line. While robots in a manufacturing environment are traditionally of a serial structure, parallel manipulators are emerging in many applications because they excel in the areas of accuracy, speed, rigidity and payload capacity.This CAREER proposal adopts an integrated research and education strategy centered on the advancement of parallel manipulators in the areas of accuracy, size of usable workspace, ease of use and energy efficiency. The research component investigates (1) the use of redundant actuation and compliant control schemes to eliminate singular configurations and thus to enlarge the usable region of the workspace, (2) the use of redundant sensing to simplify the real-time computations in the control algorithms and to increase the machine intelligence through continuous re-calibration, (3) the use of static balancing to make parallel manipulators more efficient. The educational component concentrates on (A) the development of web-based course-ware in form of "Virtual Parallel Manipulators", i.e. interactive graphical simulations of parallel manipulators;(B) the integration of parallel manipulators in the robotics curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate level through development of two new courses.The significance and impact of the proposed research and education strategy is three-fold: (1) The educational program is expected to facilitate a higher acceptance of parallel manipulators in industry, leading to better utilization of the high potential of parallel manipulators. (2) Immediate benefits for the manufacturing industry are expected through creation of robotic manipulators with higher performance characteristics than existing ones. (3) The research contributes to the long-term development of parallel manipulators by advancing the understanding of and theoretical framework for parallel manipulators.