The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Oct. 30, 1990
Filed:
Jan. 30, 1990
Bruce D Gretz, Philadelphia, PA (US);
Scott W Tilley, Belmont, CA (US);
Ford Aerospace Corporation, Newport Beach, CA (US);
Abstract
The present invention is a control system for a seven-degree-of-freedom robotic arm. The robotic arm (10) includes two links (12 and 14), each having two degrees of freedom, and a spherical wrist (26) having three degrees of freedom. The kinematics of the spherical wrist are decoupled from the kinematics of the arm. The four degrees of freedom of the arm create a redundancy which provides versatility in the positioning of the arm. Fixing the redundant arm parameter and locating the end point (24) of the end effectuator path away from areas of limited mobility results in a marked simplification of the algorithms which describe the equations of motion of the arm. Additionally, further computation reduction can be achieved by updating the control gains less frequently than every microprocessor cycle, such as updating once for every five degrees of pitch angle rotation of either joint.