Kinematics and Robot Design

The Kinematics and Robot Design group carries out fundamental research on the design, the construction, and the motion analysis of complex mechanisms and structures. These devices are parallel manipulators, multi-fingered hands, reconfigurable mechanisms, or cooperating robots, to name a few, but they appear in other domains too, as mechanistic models of locomotive organisms, molecular compounds, or nano-structures. Broadening the knowledge on the behavior of such devices is essential for the development of the increasingly-sophisticated devices of today's Robotics, which must be designed to operate within prescribed workspaces, dexterously manipulating objects, and avoiding singular configurations and collisions with the environment all of the time. The group's efforts focus on developing theories to analyze such systems, and on their physical construction.