Abstract
A hybrid drive parallel arm with 3 cylinders and 4 wires has been developed for manipulating heavy materials. This paper discusses the estimation of various data of handling object and external force at handling object using only 4 tension sensor output. The developed hybrid arm is a kind of actuation-redundant mechanism and its internal force can be freely controlled. The proposed algorithm will compensate the internal force and estimate various data by exploiting 4 tension sensor output obtained at several arm positions. The paper introduces the hybrid parallel arm and the tension sensor. Then, a control method of the arm using tension information is described. Finally, an estimation method of gravity center and mass of an unknown handling object, and external force estimation are explained. The basic experiments using the prototype arm are presented with effective reasonable results.
