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Kinematics and Robot Design Image

The KINEMATICS AND ROBOT DESIGN group carries out fundamental research on design, construction, and motion analysis of complex mechanisms and structures. These devices are parallel manipulators, multi-fingered hands, reconfigurable mechanisms, or cooperating robots, to name a few, but they appear in other domains too, as mechanistic models of locomotive organisms, molecular compounds, or nano-structures.

Head of line: Josep Maria Porta Pleite

Head of line

Tech. transfer

Our activity finds applications in several fields through collaboration with our technological partners

Research projects

We carry out projects from national and international research programmes.
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Robot design and construction

The group designs and constructs innovative mechatronic devices mainly based on parallel architectures. Our developments include the "Wrenchpad" (a six-axis tactile pad), an original air-pumped positioning table, several tensegrity-based robots, a pentaglide, several variations of the Gough-Stewart platform kinematically equivalent the octahedral manipulator, and a twelve degree-of-freedom ameba-like robot.

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Research area 1 of Kinematics

Position analysis of multi-loop linkages

The group develops techniques for linkage position analysis, i.e., for computing all possible configurations that a linkage can adopt, while respecting the kinematic constraints imposed by its joints. The problem finds applications to robotics (direct and inverse kinematics of serial/parallel robots, cooperative manipulation, and closed-chain motion planning), structural biology (conformational analysis of biomolecules), multibody dynamics (initial position and finite displacement problems), and computer-aided design (variational CAD and assembly positioning). The group works essentially along two different approaches, one based on relaxation techniques (see the CUIK project), and the other based on the deduction of characteristic polynomials using Distance Geometry.

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Research area 2 of Kinematics

Motion planning

The group also develops methods for closed-chain motion planning. In Robotics, for instance, this problem appears in motion planning for parallel manipulators, in object manipulation with anthropomorphic hands, in constraint-based object positioning, or in surgery or humanoid robots. The problem also appears in Biochemistry, when searching for low-energy paths between different molecular conformations. In all cases, a number of loop-closure constraints give rise to a configuration space of a complex structure on which standard algorithms for motion planning cannot be directly applied. The group addresses this problem using higher-dimensional continuation methods that allow characterizing the configuration space in an incremental way.

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Research area 3 of Kinematics

Singularity analysis

Singularities play a prominent role on understanding of a robot's configuration space. Depending on their nature, singularities give rise to dexterity or controllability losses and thus are to be avoided during the normal operation of a robot. They may, however, give rise to mechanical advantage too - i.e., to the transformation of small joint torques into large end-effector forces - which may be beneficial on specific applications. Also, output singularities provide the boundary of the workspace, which is a useful information for the robot designer. As a consequence, the group is developing new geometric tools that allow characterizing and computing the various singularity loci of a manipulator, either for classes of parallel mechanisms, or for general multi-body systems.

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Research area 4 of Kinematics

These are the latest research projects of the Kinematics and Robot Design research line:

These are the most recent publications (2013 - 2012) of the Kinematics and Robot Design

  • J.M. Porta and L. Jaillet. Exploring the energy landscapes of flexible molecular loops using higher-dimensional continuation. Journal of Computational Chemistry, 34(3): 234-244, 2013.

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  • L. Jaillet and J.M. Porta. Path planning under kinematic constraints by rapidly exploring manifolds. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 29(1): 105-117, 2013.

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  • O. Bohigas, M. Manubens and L. Ros. A linear relaxation method for computing workspace slices of the Stewart platform. Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics, 5(1): 011005, 2013.

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  • F. Thomas and N. Rojas. The univariate closure conditions of all fully-parallel planar robots derived from a single polynomial. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2013, to appear.

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  • F. Thomas and N. Rojas. Application of distance geometry to tracing coupler curves of pin-jointed linkages. Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics, 5(2): 021001, 2013.

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  • C. Rosales, J.M. Porta and L. Ros. Grasp optimization under specific contact constraints. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2013, to appear.

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  • L. Jaillet and J.M. Porta. Efficient asymptotically-optimal path planning on manifolds. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2013, to appear.

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  • R. Valencia, M. Morta, J. Andrade-Cetto and J.M. Porta. Planning reliable paths with Pose SLAM. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2013, to appear.

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  • O. Bohigas, M. Manubens and L. Ros. Singularities of non-redundant manipulators: A short account and a method for their computation in the planar case. Mechanism and Machine Theory, 68: 1-17, 2013.

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  • V. Ruiz de Angulo, J. Cortés and J.M. Porta. Rigid-CLL: Avoiding constant-distance computations in cell linked-lists algorithms. Journal of Computational Chemistry, 33(3): 294-300, 2012.

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  • J.M. Porta, L. Jaillet and O. Bohigas. Randomized path planning on manifolds based on higher-dimensional continuation. The International Journal of Robotics Research , 31(2): 201-215, 2012.

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  • N. Rojas and F. Thomas. On closed-form solutions to the position analysis of Baranov trusses. Mechanism and Machine Theory, 50: 179-196, 2012.

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  • S. Ulbrich, V. Ruiz de Angulo, T. Asfour, C. Torras and R. Dillman. General robot kinematics decomposition without intermediate markers. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 23(4): 620-630, 2012.

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  • S. Ulbrich, V. Ruiz de Angulo, C. Torras, T. Asfour and R. Dillman. Kinematic Bézier maps. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Part B, 42(4): 1215-1230, 2012.

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  • E. Celaya, T. Creemers and L. Ros. Exact interval propagation for the efficient solution of position analysis problems on planar linkages. Mechanism and Machine Theory, 54: 116-131, 2012.

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  • O. Bohigas, Michael E. Henderson, L. Ros and J.M. Porta. A singularity-free path planner for closed-chain manipulators, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2012, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, pp. 2128-2134, IEEE.

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  • O. Bohigas, D. Zlatanov, L. Ros, M. Manubens and J.M. Porta. Numerical computation of manipulator singularities, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2012, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, pp. 1351-1358, IEEE.

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  • L. Jaillet and J.M. Porta. Asymptotically-optimal path planning on manifolds, 2012 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference, 2012, Sydney (Australia), pp. 1-8, MIT Press.

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  • N. Rojas and F. Thomas. Formulating Assur kinematic chains as projective extensions of Baranov trusses. Mechanism and Machine Theory, 56: 16-27, 2012.

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  • N. Rojas, J. Borràs Sol and F. Thomas. The octahedral manipulator revisited, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2012, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, pp. 2293-2298, IEEE.

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  • O. Bohigas, M. Manubens and L. Ros. Planning singularity-free force-feasible paths on the Stewart platform, 13th International Symposium on Advances in Robot Kinematics, 2012, Innsbruck, in Latest Advances in Robot Kinematics, pp. 245-252, 2012, Springer.

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  • M. Manubens, G. Moroz, D. Chablat, P. Wenger and F. Rouillier. Cusp points in the parameter space of degenerate planar 3-RPR parallel manipulators. Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics, 4(4): 041003, 2012.

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  • O. Bohigas, M. Manubens and L. Ros. Navigating the wrench-feasible C-space of cable-driven hexapods, 1st International Conference on Cable-Driven Parallel Robots, 2012, Stuttgart, in Cable-Driven Parallel Robots, Vol 12 of Mechanisms and Machine Science, pp. 53-68, 2013, Springer.

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  • C. Rosales, R. Suárez, M. Gabiccini and A. Bicchi. On the synthesis of feasible and prehensile robotic grasps, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2012, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, pp. 550-556, IEEE.

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  • E. Simo-Serra, A. Perez, H. Moon and N. Robson. Kinematic synthesis of multi-fingered robotic hands for finite and infinitesimal tasks, 13th International Symposium on Advances in Robot Kinematics, 2012, Innsbruck, in Latest Advances in Robot Kinematics, pp. 173-180, 2012, Springer.

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  • O. Bohigas, M. Manubens and L. Ros. A complete method for workspace boundary determination on general structure manipulators. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 28(5): 993-1006, 2012.

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  • O. Bohigas, D. Zlatanov, M. Manubens and L. Ros. On the numerical classification of the singularities of robot manipulators, 2012 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conference, 2012, Chicago, Illinois, USA, to appear.

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  • F. Thomas and J. Borràs Sol. On the primal and dual forms of the Stewart platform pure condition. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 28(6): 1205-1215, 2012.

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  • R.H. Vaca, J. Aranda and F. Thomas. Simplified Voronoi diagrams for motion planning of quadratically-solvable Gough-Stewart platforms, 13th International Symposium on Advances in Robot Kinematics, 2012, Innsbruck, in Latest Advances in Robot Kinematics, pp. 157-164, 2012, Springer.

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  • K. Tchon, J. Jakubiak, P. Grosch and F. Thomas. Motion planning for parallel robots with non-holonomic joints, 13th International Symposium on Advances in Robot Kinematics, 2012, Innsbruck, in Latest Advances in Robot Kinematics, pp. 115-122, 2012, Springer.

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Kinematic and Robot Design Laboratory

The Kinematics and Robot Design Laboratory was created thanks to the financial support of the VALTEC program, co-financed with FEDER funds, of the Autonomous Goverment of Catalonia. It was initially created to validate the practical interest of our parallel robot designs, but it has rapidly derived into an active lab where the prototypes designed by the researches of the Group of Kinematics and Robot Design are implemented as proofs of concept.

Kinematic and Robot Design Laboratory
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Researchers

PhD Students

PFC Students