Active acceleration compensation for transport vehicles carrying delicate objects

The goal of this research is to enhance the capabilities of transport vehicles so that they can carry delicate objects without extensive packaging. The proposed approach, as first described by Graf and Dillmann (1997), is to add a robotic device (e.g., a parallel manipulator) on top of the vehicle, the motion of which compensates for certain forces and moments. This approach is called active acceleration compensation. This paper discusses performance measures for the effectiveness of acceleration compensation and a new motion planning scheme, the augmented pendulum algorithm, that is particularly effective. The basic idea is to emulate the motion of a free-swinging pendulum to minimize lateral forces acting on the objects.