Position control of a torque-unit manipulator in consideration of all state variables

A new design concept of manipulator is proposed, which is called the torque-unit manipulator (TUM). Each joint of the TUM is free and a device which is called "torque unit" is equipped on each link of the TUM. The position-controllability of TUM is shown with a conventional control law. However, with the conventional method some of the state variables cannot be controlled. In this paper, a scheme is given to overcome the problem. The scheme involves generating trajectories for the links of TUM and using the trajectories as the desired ones in position-control. Simulation results with the scheme are shown