Metodologie e criteri di controllo di un'interfaccia aptica ridondante: analisi numerica e sperimentale

The present work deals with the development of a 4-DOF redundant haptic interface, with particular focus on the redundancy coordination methods. The work is divided into two distinct parts: (i) numerical analysis and (ii) experimental analysis. The first part presents the description of the main characteristics of the device, the kinematic structure of the mechanism and the different methods used for the resolution of the inverse kinematics. Moreover an improvement of two selected methods is shown, along with results obtained from several simulations. In the second part, after a presentation of the experimental setup, the results of the implementation on physical device are shown. At the end of this part, the final choice of the best method is made. As integration of the research activities, the thesis introduces the haptic controllers currently available in literature and shows a first implementation of simple virtual environments using the physical platform previously described.