Advanced Strategies for Robot Manipulators

Robotic technology has grown beyond the boundaries of imagination during recent decades. Nowadays, it’s not very surprising to see that a robot can hear, see and even talk and a servant robot is not a dream anymore. But now we confront newer challenges such as nano-robots, surgical manipulators and even robots who can make decisions which are employed for underwater or space missions.

Amongst the robotic systems, robot manipulators have proven themselves to be of increasing importance and are widely adopted to substitute humans in repetitive and/or hazardous tasks. Modern manipulators have a complicated design and need to do more precise, crucial and critical tasks. So, the simple traditional control methods cannot be effi cient, and advanced control strategies with considering special constraints need to be established. In spite of the fact that groundbreaking researches have been carried out in this realm until now, there are still many novel aspects which have to be explored.

This book consists of a set of materials that introduces various strategies related to robot manipulators. Although the topics provided here are not in a rational order, they can be divided into three major subjects such as design and modelling, control strategies and applications of robot manipulators. These subjects cover different approaches like dynamic modelling, redundant manipulators, micro-manipulator, parallel manipulator, nonlinear control, intelligent control and many other valuable matters that are addressed here by different authors through 19 chapters.