Towards a Servovision Based Control for a Planar Parallel Manipulator

Abstract

The control of parallel kinematic machines requires the use of complex strategies due to the coupling of the kinematic chains. The usual strategies for controlling serial manipulators should be reassessed for successfully controlling parallel manipulators. For instance, the usual joint space computed torque control strategy requires the calculation of the manipulator’s inverse kinematics. The inverse kinematics of a parallel manipulator can be cumbersome. This issue may yield unsatisfactory performance and/or stability. The usual Cartesian space computed torque control strategy demands the measurement of the end-effector’s pose. This measurement can be a challenging task. In this work, the pose of the end-effector of a 3RRR parallel manipulator is estimated using a fixed camera and image processing algorithms during the execution of a predefined task. This is the first step for implementing the Cartesian space computed torque control for the manipulator under study.