Sharif Digital Repository

The Dual-Arm Cam-Lock robot is a reconfigurable manipulator formed by two parallel cooperative arms. Based on the application, these arms may loose some degrees of freedom by locking into each other. However, they are considered as redundant arms when operating without any locked joints/links. In this paper, a method is introduced to find the optimal configuration of this manipulator. The objective is to find the configuration in which maximum cooperative force is exerted to an object in a specific direction. The dynamics of the robot is parametrically formulated for different configurations, and by considering the geometrical constraints optimization is performed using fine-mesh and genetic... 

In this paper, the problem of obtaining the optimal trajectory of a Dual-Arm Cam-Lock (DACL) robot is addressed. The DACL robot is a reconfigurable manipulator consisting of two cooperative arms, which may act separately. These may also be cam-locked in each other in some links and thus lose some degrees of freedom while gaining higher structural stiffness. This will also decrease their workspace volume. It is aimed to obtain the optimal configuration of the robot and the optimal joint trajectories to minimize the consumed energy for following a specific task space path. The Pontryagin's Minimum Principle is utilized with a shooting method to resolve kinematic redundancy. Numerical examples...