Preliminary design of a whole-arm manipulation system (WAMS)

Abstract

An approach to manipulation that uses all the available manipulation surfaces of the robot to act on and sense the environment is outlined. The kinematic, mechanism, actuation, and control implications of such a design are discussed and initial experimentation with a prototype mechanism are described. A three-degree-of-freedom underwater manipulator using a number of the resulting design concepts is described.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>