Integration of parallel arm and legged mechanism

An excavation robot is required to build a large scale underground dome. The excavation robot is developed which is composed of a parallel manipulator and four legged locomotion machine. Although the parallel manipulator has a nice feature of producing large force required for the excavation, cooperative control should be considered to achieve effective excavation. This paper discusses integrated kinematics for r legs and parallel arm mechanism for analysis of the mechanism and its control. Based on the derived kinematics, evaluation criteria are introduced in order to design the mechanism itself as well as the motion controller. Numerical examples show how the proposed methods work effectively to analyze motion of the integrated mechanism.