Federico Thomas - Böcker

This work presents research advances in the theory, design, control and application of robotic systems. These could be intended for a variety of purposes, such as manipulation, manufacturing, automation, surgery, locomotion, and biomechanics. The issues addressed are fundamentally kinematic in nature, including synthesis, calibration, redundancy, force control, dexterity, inverse and forward kinematics, kinematic singularities, as well as over-constrained systems. Methods used include line geometry, quaternion algebra, screw algebra, and linear algebra. These methods are applied to both parallel and serial multi-degree-of-freedom systems. The results should interest researchers, teachers and students, in fields of engineering and mathematics related to robot theory, design, control and application.

This book shows how, through certain geometric transformations, some of the standard joints used in parallel robots can be replaced with lockable or non-holonomic joints.

This is the fifth book of the Kluwer's series Advances in Robot Kine­ matics. The book presents the most recent research advances in the theory, design, control and application of robotic systems, which are intended for a variety of purposes such as manipulation, manufactur­ ing, automation, surgery, locomotion and biomechanics. The issues addressed are fundamentally kinematic in nature, including synthesis, calibration, redundancy, force control, dexterity, inverse and forward kinematics, kinematic singularities, as well as over-constrained systems. Methods used include line geometry, quaternion algebra, screw alge­ bra, and linear algebra. These methods are applied to both parallel and serial multi-degree-of-freedom systems. The results should interest researchers, teachers and students, in fields of engineering and mathe­ matics related to robot theory, design, control and application. Each contribution in this book had been rigorously reviewed by two or three independent reviewers and 53 articles had been recommended for publication. We are happy to observe that Advances in Robot Kine­ matics has always attracted the most outstanding authors and has de­ veloped a remarkable scientific community in the area. Many important and original scientific results were for the first time reported and dis­ cussed in these books. All articles in this book were also reported at the eight international symposium on Advances in Robot Kinematics that was organised in June 2002 in Caldes de Malavella in Spain.

Computational kinematics is an enthralling area of science with a rich spectrum of problems at the junction of mechanics, robotics, computer science, mathematics, and computer graphics. The covered topics include design and optimization of cable-driven robots, analysis of parallel manipulators, motion planning, numerical methods for mechanism calibration and optimization, geometric approaches to mechanism analysis and design, synthesis of mechanisms, kinematical issues in biomechanics, construction of novel mechanical devices, as well as detection and treatment of singularities. The results should be of interest for practicing and research engineers as well as Ph.D. students from the fields of mechanical and electrical engineering, computer science, and computer graphics.