Analysis of self-adaptive robotic mechanisms

本申请中提出的研究计划旨在为新应用开发自适应机器人系统的新架构，并探索这些系统的运动学中有趣的特性。特别是，研究计划将集中在1)自适应机构的设计，使用连杆驱动传动两种新的应用和2)触觉探索模型的发展。在过去的几十年里，人们提出了利用自适应机制的机电一体化系统。这些机制的特点是将部分控制任务委托给系统的机械布局而不是电子板。自适应机构最著名的应用是欠驱动抓取，其中驱动器的闭合运动机械地分布到机械人手的几个自由度（DOF）上。这就产生了一个机械手，它可以机械地适应被抓物体的形状，而不需要任何传感器或专门的控制法则。自适应机制直到最近才在机器人技术中得到考虑，因为最普遍的趋势是期望计算设备的不断增长的能力将允许轻松高效地控制所有系统，尽管它们固有的复杂性。然而，这一预测只是部分实现，因为现代数字系统计算能力的提高并不总是能够克服所有这些缺点。在过去的十年中，申请人对欠驱动机械手进行了深入的研究，这项研究工作的结果导致了数百种新的机械结构的发现，以及一种基于驱动连杆运动学分析的综合它们的方法。

The research program proposed in this application aims at developing new architectures of self-adaptive robotic systems for novel applications as well as exploring intriguing properties in the kinematics of these systems. In particular, the research program will focus on 1) the design of self-adaptive mechanisms using linkage-driven transmissions for two novel applications and 2) the development of haptic exploration models. Over the past decades, mechatronic systems have been proposed taking advantage of self-adaptive mechanisms. These mechanisms are characterized by the property of having a part of the control tasks delegated to the mechanical layout of the system rather than to an electronic board. The most well-known application of self-adaptive mechanisms is underactuated grasping where the closing motion of an actuator is mechanically distributed to the several degrees of freedom (DOF) of a robotic hand. This results in a robotic hand which adapts mechanically to the shape of the seized objects without any sensors or dedicated control laws. Self-adaptive mechanisms have only recently been considered in robotics since the still most common trend has been to expect that the growing power of computational devices would allow to easily control all systems with great efficiency despite their inherent complexity. However, this prediction has only been partially fulfilled as the increase of the computation capabilities of modern digital systems has not always been able to overcome all these drawbacks. Underactuated robotic hands have been intensively studied by the applicant during the last decade and the results of this research effort lead to the discovery of hundreds of new mechanical architectures and a methodology to synthesize them based of the analysis of the driven linkage kinematics.