Coordinated Control of the Dual Gantry-Tau Robot

Utilization of multiple parallel robots operating in the same work place and cooperating on the same job has opened up new challenges in coordination control strategies. With the possibility of cooperative control architecture, parallel robots will be able to perform many of the tasks currently requiring dual serial robots such as complex assemblies, heavy load sharing and large machining jobs. This paper highlights the development of coordinated control strategy for the dual Gantry-Tau robot’s manipulators. The basic aim is to precisely control the movement of the individual manipulator to track the desired trajectories and to efficiently synchronize the motion of the manipulators to minimize the positional offset between them. The coordinated control system is modeled in Matlab Simulink environment which accommodated three feedback loops to control current, velocity and position which are fed through a simple PID controller. The model is validated with experimental data obtained form on-line implementation.