Kinematic control of a new hyper-redundant manipulator with lockable joints

Kinematic control of a special hyper-redundant manipulator with lockablejoints is studied. in this manipulator, the extra cables are replaced by a locking systemto reduce the weight of the structure and the number of actuators. this manipulator hasdiscrete and continuous variables due to its locking system. therefore, a hybrid approachhas been adopted in control. at rst the forward kinematics and velocity kinematics of thismanipulator are derived, and then a novel closed-loop control algorithm is presented. thisalgorithm consists of decision making, an inner loop controller, and kinematic calculationblocks. the decision making block is the logical part of the control scheme in whichsuitable switches will be chosen. the control block uses the end-eector position feedbackto generate appropriate commands. the performance of the proposed hybrid control schemein position tracking is assessed for several trajectories