Mechatronic Design and Control of a Light Weight Manipulator Arm for Mobile Platforms

Mobile robotic platforms equipped with manipulation capabilities can fulfill the requirements of a wide range of applications requiring functionality that is not only limited to the monitoring of the environment but also permits to interact and execute physical operations within the application space. This paper presents the IIT-INAIL arm, a light weight robotic manipulator designed to be mounted on the quadrupedal robot HyQReal, resulting in a highly capable platform for teleoperation and manipulation tasks in challenging real-world environments. The arm incorporates a number of key design features and components, such as high performance elastic actuators, robust and light-weight design principles, a dexterous end-effector, and kinematics tailored to the mobile application. The control system of the robot arm allows the fully transparent integration with a mobile platform to execute tele-manipulation in remote environments through a rich set of control modes from classical position to torque and high-fidelity impedance control. The performance of the developed manipulator is demonstrated by a set of experiments through heavy payload manipulation and impedance control tasks.