Arm-Following Manipulator Control Without Visual Sensors
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional manipulators struggle to accurately follow the movement of a user's arm without visual sensors, leading to increased manufacturing costs and limitations in user convenience and control precision.
Innovation Solution
A manipulator with a plurality of links corresponding to an upper arm, fore arm, and hand, equipped with motors and a processor that uses rotation angle information and equilibrium angle calculations to control the manipulator's movements based on sensing values from external sensors, allowing it to operate without visual sensors.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If a visual sensor or wireless signal transmitter/receiver is installed to determine the location and posture of a user's arm, then the manipulator can follow the user's movement, but the manufacturing cost increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts and removes the visual sensor and wireless signal transmitter/receiver from the manipulator system. Instead of using these external sensing components, the invention uses the manipulator's own motor rotation angle information to determine the location and posture of the user's arm, thereby eliminating the need for additional expensive sensing equipment while maintaining measurement capability.
Solution Approach 2:
The manipulator uses its own motor rotation angle data to self-determine the user's arm position and posture without requiring external sensors. The system serves its own measurement needs by leveraging information already available from its motor control system, eliminating the need for separate sensing infrastructure.
2Device complexity
If links are not mapped one to one with user's arm links, then the manipulator structure is simpler, but the manipulator cannot correctly follow the user's movement
Solution Approach 1:
The patent changes the parameters used for determining arm position from direct sensor measurements to motor rotation angles. By using the rotation angles of the manipulator's own motors as the basis for calculating user arm position and posture, the system achieves accurate movement following without requiring complex one-to-one link mapping or additional sensing components.
3Device complexity
If quaternion information from a sensor on the user's hand is used to assume the posture of the manipulator's hand, then the control system is simpler, but posture errors accumulatively increase from shoulder to hand
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts and removes the dependency on quaternion information from hand-mounted sensors. Instead of using sensor data that requires complex error compensation across multiple joints, the invention directly uses motor rotation angles from the manipulator's own control system, eliminating the source of cumulative posture errors while maintaining control system simplicity.
Data Source
AI summary
A manipulator and a method for controlling the manipulator are disclosed. The manipulator includes: a plurality of links respectively corresponding to a user's upper arm, fore arm, and hand, a plurality of motors rotating the plurality of links, a communication interface comprising communication circuitry, a memory storing at least one instruction, and a processor configured to execute the at least one instruction, wherein the processor is configured to: based on first rotation angle information for motors corresponding to the upper arm and the fore arm among the plurality of motors, obtain information for a body frame of a link corresponding to the fore arm, obtain equilibrium angle information that positions the body frame in equilibrium with a specified reference frame, based on receiving a sensing value indicating the posture of the hand from an external sensor through the communication interface, obtain second rotation angle information for motors corresponding to the hand among the plurality of motors based on the sensing value and the equilibrium angle information, and control the motors corresponding to the hand based on the second rotation angle information.