IPR 2013 - International Workshop on Industrial Parallel Robotics: New Challenges in Design and Control

Nowadays, all around the world, robots are used to perform a very large variety of manipulation tasks in a vast range of industries. They are used in assembling,cutting, spraying, painting, welding, palletizing, polishing, packaging, and more applications.Despite the existence of different types of robots, parallel structures are increasingly used in industry. They are commonly well known for their stiffness because of the entirely closed kinematic chains and their lightness giving them the ability to be very fast. This workshop aims to present Parallel Robotics as a real opportunity for industry through the presentation of different kind of existing and possible applications. The topics emerging from recent advances in optimization, design and control of this kind of structures are particularly pointed out to emphasize on the existing results and the new challenges to be addressed. Optimizationand dimensional synthesis of robotsare capital for the design of an industrial structure. Different procedures and methods exist. Asynthesis methodology in which the problem is expressed in terms of multiobjective optimization is pointed out during this workshop.Several criteria of performance such as workspace, kinetostatic performances, stiffness, and dynamic dexterity are taken into account. Interesting results through different use cases will be presented and discussed. When dealing with control of parallel robots, interesting issuesincludefast pick and place applications. Indeed, looking for short cycle times in robotized manipulations means obviously to look for short motion and stabilization times, while guaranteeing the robustness of performances with respect to disturbances and changes/uncertainties in operational conditions. The topic of parallel robot control is particularly detailed. Different control strategies and particularly, the design of an adaptive controller for extremely fast pick-and-place tasks (up to 100G of acceleration) are pointed out. Experimental results, for different case studies, will be presented and discussed.