— A “Discretely Actuated Robotic Manipulator”, or “D-ARM”, is any member of a class of robotic manipulators powered by actuators that have only discrete positional stable states such as solenoids. One of the most significant kinematic phenomena of D-ARMs is the discreteness of both input range and end-effector frames. The main characteristics of D-ARMs are: stability at each state without feedback loop; high task repeatability; mechanism simplicity; minimal supporting devices; low cost. These are strong advantages for manufacturing automation; mobile robot; space structure; micro/nano mechanism. The proposing design method is based on an incremental kinematic synthesis with a numerically obtained Jacobian matrix of a base-line manipulator and its generalized inverse matrix. The significance of this method is that it deals with a set of inverse kinematic problems on the Special Euclidean group in three space, ¢¡¤£ ¥ ¦ , instead of one on the Euclidean space, §©¨ ....
Keizo Miyahara, Gregory S. Chirikjian