Abstract: The HumanoidLab is a more than 5 year old activity aimed to use educational robots to approach students to our Research Centre. Different commercial educative humanoid platforms have been used to introduce students to different aspects of robotics using projects and offering guidance and assistance. About 40 students have performed small mechanics, electronics or programming projects that are used to improve the robots by

This paper deals with the motion planning problem for parallel orienting platforms with one non-holonomic joint and two prismatic actuators which can maneuver to reach any three-degree-of-freedom pose of the moving platform. Since any system with two inputs and up to four generalized coordinates can always be transformed into chained form, this path planning problem can be solved using well-established procedures. Nevertheless, the use of these procedures requires a good understanding of Lie algebraic methods whose technicalities have proven a challenge to many practitioners who are not familiar with them. As an alternative, we show how by (a) properly locating the actuators, and (b) representing the platform orientation using Euler parameters, the studied path planning problem admits a closed-form solution whose derivation requires no other tools than ordinary linear algebra.

This paper introduces a class of reconfigurable parallel robots consisting of a fixed base and a moving platform connected by serial chains having RRPS (Revolute-Revolute-Prismatic-Spherical) topology. Only the prismatic joint is actuated and the first revolute joint in the chain can be locked or released online. The introduction of these lockable joints allow the prismatic actuators to maneuver to approximate 6-DoF motions for the moving platform. An algorithm for generating these maneuvers is first described. Then, a motion planner, based on the generation of a Probabilistic RoadMap (PRM) whose nodes are connected using the described maneuvers, is presented. The generated trajectories avoid singularities and possible collisions between legs.