On the Kinematic Analysis and Design of a Redundant Manipulator for a Captive Trajectory Simulation System (CTS)

This paper presents the challenges involved in the design of a redundant manipulator that operates inside a supersonic wind tunnel as part of a captive trajectory simulation (CTS) system. Redundancy provides the manipulator more, degrees of freedom than necessary to cover its task space. As a consequence, the complexity of the design of the manipulator increases drastically. Two optimization problems arising in such a design are detailed: finding lower hounds on joint speeds and finding upper hounds for error allowances. These two problems are formulated as nonlinear optimization programs and their resolution is part of a suggested design iteration loop for redundant manipulators