A robot manipulator handling a heavy weight requires high-capacity motors and speed reducers, which increases the cost of a robot and the risk of injury when a human worker is in collaboration with a robot. To cope with this problem, we propose a collaborative manipulator equipped with a counterbalance mechanism which compensates mechanically for a gravitational torque due to the robot mass. The prototype of the manipulator was designed on the basis of a four-bar linkage structure which contains active and passive pitch joints. Experimental performance evaluation shows that the proposed robot works effectively as a collaborative robot.

Dual arm manipulators have been developed for the entertainment purpose such as humanoid type or the industrial application such as automatic assembly. Nowadays, there are some issues for applying the dual arm robot system into the various fields. Especially, robots can substitute human and perform the dangerous activity such as search and rescue in the battle field or disaster. In the paper, the dual arm manipulator which can be adapted to the rescue robot with the mobile platform was developed. The kinematic design was proposed for the rescue activity and the required specification was determined through the kinematic analysis and the dynamic analysis in the various conditions. The proposed dual arm manipulator was manufactured based on the vibration analysis result and its performance was proved by the experiment.

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.

A mobile manipulator is a system with a robotic manipulator mounted on top of a mobile base. It has both indoor and outdoor applications for transporting or transferring materials. When a user gives commands, they are usually at high levels such as “move the object to the table,” or “tidy the room.” By intelligently decomposing these complex commands into several subtasks, the mobile manipulator can perform the tasks with a greater efficiency. One of the crucial subtasks for these commands is the pick‐and‐place task. For the mobile manipulator, selection of a good base position and orientation is essential to accomplishing this task. This paper presents an algorithm that determines one of the position and orientation of a mobile manipulator in order to complete the pickand‐ place task without human intervention. Its effectiveness are shown for a mobile manipulator with 9 degrees‐of‐freedom in simulations