Development of an Anthropomorphic Gripping Manipulator: The Study of Kinematics and Virtual Modeling of Grip

Abstract

The article is a study into the kinematic scheme of a newly developed anthropomorphic manipulator designed to perform gripping and holding tasks on items from a predefined set. Within the study is the implementation of a mathematical model describing the kinematics of a multilink manipulator using the GraspIt package. The method used in this study allows for the calculation of design parameters for manipulator grip functions at an early stage of the creation process as well as to verify the effectiveness of the kinematic scheme of the manipulator on how adequately it can perform its primary functions of griping and holding certain objects, which is vitally important in the design of universal anthropomorphic handling manipulators for special applications, such as bionic prostheses as well as manipulators with arbitrary kinematic schemes. The presented program model provides a preliminary calculation of the motion trajectories of the manipulator unit through the so-called eigengrasp (synonym-synergy, synchronous motion) and can be used as a virtual model for building embedded control systems for robot manipulators. It is shown that in the development of anthropomorphic handling manipulators for operating with small-sized objects it is more efficient to use the monkey scheme, but if the main group of target objects is primarily large items, then it is better to use the human scheme.