Simulation of simple movements of Arm-Z oblique swivel joint chain manipulator

Abstract

Arm-Z is a concept of a hyper-redundant manipulator based on linearly joined sequence of congruent modules by oblique swivel joint mechanism. Each module has one degree of freedom only, namely a twist relative to the previous module in the sequence. Although the concept of this type of manipulator is relatively old and simple, its control is very difficult an nonintuitive, which results in a limited use in industrial practice. This paper presents a simple simulation of Arm-Z in Mathematica programming environment which demonstrates a few simple but potentially useful movements.