Description

The aim of the thesis is to define, analyze, and verify through practical implementations, parallel robots with unconventional joints that allow them to be under-actuated and/or reconfigurable. The new designs will be based on the

1. 6SPS robot (alternatively 6UPS or 6SPU, depending on the implementation) when considering the spatial case (i.e., robots with 3 degrees of freedom of rotation and 3 degrees of freedom of translation).

2. S-3SPS robot (alternatively S-3UPS or S-3SPU, depending on the implementation) when considering spherical robots (i.e., robots with 3 degrees of freedom of rotation).

In both cases, through certain geometric transformations, some of the standard joints will be replaced by lockable or non-holonomic joints. These substitutions permit reducing the number of legs (and hence the number of actuators needed to control the robot), without losing the ability of the original robot to bring the mobile platform to any position and orientation (in case of a spatial robot), or to any orientation (in case of a spherical robot) within its workspace.

The work is under the scope of the following projects:

• VALTEC: Sistema de muntatge de robots paral.lels (web)