Modeling and control of new elements of the AMADEUS gripper designed for fast manipulative tasks

The paper presents the definition of the characteristics of a new manipulator based on the elephant trunk principle but with a special kind of large bandwidth actuators working with oil at low pressure, controlled by the sliding modes technique and with a new simplex-based approach for tracking trajectories. This work represents a point of convergence of two complementary activities. The first activity was aimed at defining an electromechanical structure characterized by a model with reduced complexity and uncertainties, while the second one was devoted to the development of an appropriate control methodology exploiting the mechanical structure main features, to achieve tracking objectives despite of uncertainties and nonlinearities