A novel cobot and control

Cobots are inherently passive robots intended for direct collaboration with a human operator. Cobots possess the advantages of conventional robots such as better bearing load capacity and high order accuracy, and still take advantage of the superiorities of the operator such as high intelligence, vision and haptic capacities, dexterity and so on. A novel cobot architecture was put forward by the non-holonomic constraint feature of a differential gear. In terms of different coupling modes between differential mechanisms and joints, parallel and serial cobot architectures were constructed, and kinematic models of two kinds of cobots and a control model of the trajectory constraint were built up. A prototype of five-linkage serial cobot architecture was introduced and experimental study was completed. The experimental results show that the novel cobot can track a desirable straight line, and that it possesses non-holonomic constraint feature. If perfected further, it can be applied in assembly production lines of large-size parts, surgery operations and some situations requiring man-machine cooperation.