KINEMATICS, MOTION PLANNING AND DESIGN OF A FREE-FLOATING DUAL-ARM PLANAR MANIPULATOR

Dual-arm free-floating robots will play an important role in space robotics and industrial handling over large factory work floors. This paper deals with analytical studies of a free-floating dual-arm planar manipulator which is currently under construction at Ohio University. The robot floats on a flat table using air bearings. In the absence of externally applied forces in the plane of operation and couples normal to this plane, the linear momentum in the plane and angular momentum normal to this plane are conserved. These conservation principles are not applicable to structurally similar fixed-base manipulators. As a result, kinematics, motion planning, and design of dual-arm free-floating planar manipulators are different from structurally similar fixed-base manipulators. In this paper, we address the following topics for dual-arm free-floating planar robots: (1) development of a forward kinematic model and a procedure for computation of the inverse kinematic solutions, (2) motion planning using position inverse kinematics and (3) design guidelines for dual-arm free-floating planar robots.