Corporate Activity — Mergers and Acquisitions.pdfVIP

Chapter 12 Dynamics of Complex Robotic Mechanical Systems 12.1 Introduction The subject of this chapter is the dynamics of the class of robotic mechanical systems introduced in Chap. 10 under the generic name of complex. Notice that this class comprises serial manipulators not allowing a decoupling of the orientation from the positioning tasks. For purposes of dynamics, this decoupling is irrelevant and hence, was not a condition in the study of the dynamics of serial manipulators in Chap. 7. Thus, serial manipulators need not be further studied here, the focus being on parallel manipulators and rolling robots. The dynamics of walking machines and multifingered hands involves special features that render these systems more elab- orate from the dynamics viewpoint, for they exhibit a time-varying topology. What this means is that these systems include kinematic loops that open when a leg takes off or when a finger releases an object and open chains that close when a leg touches ground or when a finger makes contact with an object. The implication here is that the degree of freedom of these systems is time-varying. The derivation of such a mathematical model is discussed in Pfeiffer et al. (1995), but is left out in this book. The degree of freedom (dof) of the mechanical systems studied here is thus constant. Now, the two kinds of systems studied here pertain to very different types, for parallel manipulators fall into the realm of holonomic, while rolling robots into that of nonholonomic, mechanical systems. In order to better understand this essential difference between these two types of systems, we give below a summary of the classification of mechanical systems at large. 12.2 Classification of Robotic Mechanical Systems with Regard to Dynamics Because robotic mechanical systems are a class of general mechanical systems, a classification of the latter will help