Drivable workspace analysis of the reconfiguration mechanism in a mobile robots system

At first, this paper briefly introduces a novel reconfigurable mobile robots system JL-1 and the serial and parallel mechanism using to perform the reconfiguration actions. Based on the kinematics equations of the serial and parallel mechanism, the static transformation equations of it are concluded according to the virtual work theory, which is useful in determining the drivable workspace of the reconfiguration mechanism. Then the valid workspace of the serial and parallel mechanism of JL-1 is concluded via the transformation matrix of the loads in world coordinates to those on the driving motors according to the real parameters of the motors in JL-1 and the weight of JL-1 robot. The degeneration phenomenon of the workspace is found due to the limited torque of the rotating motor, and a drivable workspace is acquired. At last, by choosing the valid joint path in the drivable workspace, a series of experiments are performed to demonstrate the validity of the theory concluded in this paper.