In this paper, a new kind of six-parallel-legged robot is presented. It is designed for drilling holes on the aircraft surface. Each leg of the robot is a 3-DOF parallel mechanism with three chains: 1UP and 2UPS. The three prismatic joints are active joints and can be controlled either by position or by force. First, the task process and the gait plan are discussed and then, according to the requirement, the control method is introduced. After that, the mechanism topology patterns under different working conditions are studied and the control mode of each motor is determined. Then the kinematical model is built up, based on which the position control curves can be obtained. The simulation result shows that the robot can walk pretty well on the fuselage surface and that the actuation forces are quite smooth. Furthermore, the first prototype has been manufactured and some experiments such as walking and manipulation have been done.

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This article presents a special 6-degree-of freedom parallel manipulator, and the mechanical structure of this robot has been introduced; with this structure, the kinematic constrain equations are decoupled. Based on this character, the polynomial solutions of the forward kinematics problem are also presented. In this method, the closed-loop kinematic chain of the manipulator is divided into two parts, the solution forward position kinematics is obtained by a first-degree polynomial equation first, and then an eighth-degree polynomial equation in a single variable for the forward orientation kinematics is obtained. Based on those solutions, the configurations of the robot, including position and orientation of the end-effector, are graphically displayed. A numerical simulation is given to verify the algorithm, and the result implies that for a given set of input values, the manipulator can be assembled in eight different configurations at most. And a set of experiments illustrate the motion ability for forward kinematics of the prototype of this manipulator.

This paper presents kinematic analysis of a 3-degree of freedom parallel mechanism for hexapod walking-operating multifuctional robot. Each leg of the robot consists of three limbs: universal joint – prismatic joint chain (1-UP) and universal joint – prismatic joint – spherical joint chain (2-UPS) and at the end of the leg there is passive spherical joint to adjust to the uneven ground. In this paper, first the forward kinematic model is built and it shows that the model has close-form solution. Then the work space is discussed in which the robot feet trajectories can be projected. It can be shown that the current trajectories of the feet only take very small work space. After that force analysis is performed and the results show that the payload capability of the mechanism is very high. Experiments of the prototype show that the robot can walk easily with more than 150 kg loads while the step size is more than 0.5 m.

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SUMMARYFault tolerance is a very important issue for legged robots, especially in some harsh environments. One of the most fragile parts is the actuation system. There are two common faults of robot actuators: (1) the motor is locked and could not move anymore; (2) the motor is uncontrollable and can be treated as a passive joint. In this paper, we first discuss all fault combinations of a single leg of a hexapod walking robot with parallel-parallel mechanism topology. Then, the leg tolerable criterion is brought out, which defines whether a leg is fault tolerant. After that, the fault tolerance of the whole robot is researched, and we found that the robot can walk with one tolerable leg or two opposite tolerable legs. Finally, relative simulation results are given, which show the robot walk with one or two broken legs.