Position Control of a 3-CPU Spherical Parallel Manipulator

Abstract

The paper presents the first experimental results on the control of a prototypal robot designed for the orientation of parts or tools. The innovative machine is a spherical parallel manipulator actuated by 3 linear motors; several position control schemes have been tested and compared with the final aim of designing an interaction controller. The relative simplicity of machine kinematics allowed to test algorithms requiring the closed-loop evaluation of both inverse and direct kinematics; the compensation of gravitational terms has been experimented as well.