Design and Control of a Compliant Parallel Manipulator

We describe a novel design for a compliant arm that can be moun ted on a mobile robot. Because the arm is compliant, a mobile r obot can manipulate or interact with objects that are not precisely p ositioned in the environment. The main features of the arm ar e the in-parallel architecture and a novel control scheme that allows us to easily control th e Cartesian stiffness or impedance in the plane. Springs areadded in series to the limbs of the parallel manipulator. We analyze one limb and the manipu lator to determine its performance when either controllingthe force applied to an object or controlling its stiffness. Further, we present experime ntal results that show the performance of the compliant arm.