Recently much research has been done for the delicate force and precise position control with a micro robot in the areas such as micro-assembly, microsurgery, and so on. However, the micro robot has very small workspace so that we need to attach it at the end of a macro robot, that has large workspace, such as an industrial robot, to increase the workspace. This kind of a system is called a macro/micro robot system. The macro/micro robot system generally has an independent controller for the macro and micro robot respectively. Therefore coordination strategy becomes an important issue for the macro/micro robot that has respective controllers.
First, from the dynamic analysis of macro/micro robot, it is shown that we can design stable independent controllers respectively. Second, a controller is designed for the coordination of macro/micro robot which has respective controllers. Then, the method for cruising to the neutral position is proposed as a proper coordination control method for a macro/micro robot, and trajectory generation method is also proposed to track the moving desired position rapidly. Finally, the control strategy has been implemented to the macro/micro robot system, which is composed of an industrial serial macro robot and a parallel micro robot, to verify the performance of the proposed controller.
With the simulation and experiment, the performance of the designed coordination controller has been evaluated. The proposed method for cruising of the micro robot to the neutral position has uniform performance over the various range bandwidth, and the proposed trajectory generator is shown to be efficient.
