This paper presents a column-climbing robot with a mechanical manipulator, which can spirally go up and down a column using wheels. The developed robot can do useful works using the manipulator at the top of a column, e.g., electric pole while communicating wirelessly with an operator panel. It is driven using a battery without any power cables, and the average duration of power is at least one hour. The robot has a function to detect a work object using an optical sensor installed at the bottom of the manipulator. The spirally column-climbing robot developed is demonstrated by experimental works and also by showing it at an exhibition.

Continuous-path motion control such as resolved motion rate control requires online solving of the inverse differential kinematics for a robot. However, the solution space of the inverse differential kinematics related to Jacobian J is not well-established. In this paper, the solution space of inverse differential kinematics is analyzed through categorization of mapping conditions between joint velocities and end-effector velocity of a robot. If end-effector velocity is within the column space of J, the solution or the minimum norm solution is obtained. If it is not within the column space of J, an approximate solution by least-squares is obtained. Moreover, this paper introduces an improved mapping diagram showing orthogonality and mapping clearly between subspaces, and concrete examples numerically showing the concept of several subspaces. Finally, a solver and graphics user interface (GUI) for inverse differential kinematics are developed using MATLAB, and the solution of inverse differential kinematics using the GUI is demonstrated for a vertically articulated robot.

Suppressing residual vibrations of flexible materials cheaply is an important issue to increase productivity of automated factory using wafer or glass handling robots. In this paper, we present Linux/RTAI-based implementation of input shaping control for reducing residual vibrations of a mechanical system. Experimental results show that residual vibrations of the mechanical system are reduced up to 82% at a point-to-point linear motion.