Design and fabrication of a servo-manipulator for use in the PRIDE facility

This paper describes the design and fabrication of a cable-driven dual arm master-slave servo-manipulator. The cable transmission has been selected because it greatly reduces the weight and friction, and it also allows realizing a backlash-free actuation. However, it causes a motion coupling problem due to unwanted motion interference at the joints. In this work, we solve this problem through a novel motion decoupling mechanism. Also, a simple balancing method based on potential energy equilibrium has been proposed to counterweight 3-axis motion such as pitch and roll of upper arm, and pitch of forearm.