A 3-PRS Parallel Manipulator Control Based on Neural Network

Qingsong Xu and Yangmin Li

Department of Electromechanical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Av. Padre Toms Pereira, Taipa, Macao SAR, P.R. China a {ya47401,ymli}@umac.mo http://www.sftw.umac.mo/~yangmin/

Abstract. Due to the time-consuming calculation for the forward kinematics of a 3-PRS (prismatic-revolute-spherical) parallel manipulator, neither the kinematic nor dynamic control algorithm can be implemented on real time. To deal with such problem, the forward kinematics is solved by means of articial neural network (NN) approach in this paper. Based on the trained NN, the kinematic control of the manipulator is carried out by resorting to an ordinary control algorithm. Simulation results illustrate that the NN can approximate the forward kinematics perfectly, which leads to ideal control results of the parallel manipulator.

Introduction

A parallel manipulator (PM) typically consists of a moving platform and a xed based, which are connected by more than one limbs or legs actuating in parallel. Generally, PMs can provide some attractive merits over their serial counterparts in terms of high speed, high rigidity, and high accuracy, etc., which enable them become challenging alternatives for wide applications such as ight simulators, machine tools, ultra-precision instruments, medical devices, and so on [15]. Recently, limited-DOF (degree of freedom) PMs with less than six DOF are drawing attentions of more and more researchers because these limited-DOF PMs own several other additional advantages in terms of total cost reduction in manufacture and operations. As a result, a lot of limited-DOF PMs have been proposed and investigated for various applications [13, 2, 14, 16, 12]. The 3-PRS architecture parallel mechanism possesses three spatial DOF with two rotations about the x and y axes, and one translational motion along the z axis. Thus, this tripod-based PM has potential applications where the orientation and reachable distance in z direction are more important than the translations in x and y directions. In previous works concerning this type of PM, the forward displacement kinematics problem is solved in [11] by using the Sylvester dialytic elimination method, and the compliance analysis of the PM is carried out in [9]. After that, the forward kinematics problem is dealt with by the authors via the Newton iterative algorithm in [10], where the inverse dynamic model is established as well. In addition, the manipulator workspace is generated by adopting the NN approach in [8] successfully.
D. Liu et al. (Eds.): ISNN 2007, Part I, LNCS 4491, pp. 757766, 2007. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007

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However, up to now, there are no eorts made towards neither kinematic nor dynamic control of such type of PM in the literatures yet. The main reason is that both the forward displacement kinematics (FDK) and inverse dynamics of the manipulator are too complicated to be calculated online in a control procedure, which prohibit further applications of the promising 3-PRS PM. In addition, the FDK has multiple solutions. Recently, NNs are used to solve the FDK problems of PMs and attract many researchers due to their considerable ability to approximate nonlinear maps or functions, and their generalization capacities and structures which make them robust and fault-tolerant in algorithms. And NN has been successfully applied to compute the FDK problems of some kinds of PMs, e.g., [5, 6, 7]. In this paper, to solve the real time control problem of a 3-PRS PM, the FDK is solved by resorting to the articial neural network (NN) approach. It is shown that, once properly trained, the NN can approximate the FDK quickly and can be adopted in real-time control of the manipulator.

Fig. 1. CAD model of a 3-PRS parallel manipulator

Displacement Kinematics Analysis of the Manipulator

The CAD model of a 3-PRS PM is shown in Fig. 1, which is composed of a moving platform and a xed base, which are connected by three supporting limbs with identical kinematic structure. Each limb consists of a prismatic (P) joint, a revolute (R) joint, and a spherical (S) joint in sequence, where the P joint is actuated by a linear actuator. As depicted in Fig. 2, a xed reference frame O{x, y, z } is attached at the centered point O of the xed base platform A1 A2 A3 . Similarly, a moving frame P {u, v, w } is attached at point P which is the centered point of the moving

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A2

d 2d 20

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0 d 1d 1

d3 d
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N
l 20

l10

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Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of a 3-PRS PM

platform B1 B2 B3 . Without lose of generality, let the x axis point along vector OA1 , and the u axis along P B1 . Both A1 A2 A3 and B1 B2 B3 are designed to be equilateral triangle to yield a symmetrical workspace of the manipulator. Let d = [d1 d2 d3 ]T be the vector of the three actuated joint variables, and Xa = [px py pz 1 2 3 ]T be the vector of constrained and unconstrained variables, which describes the pose (position and orientation) of the moving platform with 1 , 2 , and 3 representing the Z-Y-Z Euler angles. The transformation from the moving frame to xed frame can be described by a position vector p = [px py pz ]T , and a 33 rotation matrix O RP , which can be expressed by O RP = Rz (1 ) Ry (2 ) Rz (3 ) . (1) Meanwhile, assign u, v, and w be three unit vectors directing along the u, v, and w axes of the moving frame P . Then the rotation matrix can be expressed in terms of the direction cosines of u, v, and w as follows: ux vx wx O RP = uy vy wy . (2) uz vz wz The position vector qi pointing from O to the i-th S joint Bi can be expressed by qi = p + bi ,
O P T

(3)

where bi = RP bi and qi = [qix qiy qiz ] , for i = 1, 2, and 3. Considering the mechanical constraints imposed by the R joint, the S joint Bi can only move in a plane dened by the i-th linear actuator and i-th link Ci Bi . Therefore the following three equations hold

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q1y = 0, q2y = 3 q2x , q3y = 3 q3x . Substituting the components of qi from (3) into (4), yields py + buy = 0, vx = uy , b px = (ux vy ), 2 which impose three constraints on the motion of the moving platform. 2.1 Inverse Displacement Kinematics (IDK) Modeling

(4a) (4b) (4c)

(5a) (5b) (5c)

The inverse displacement kinematics (IDK) problem solves the actuated variables from a given position and orientation of the output platform. With reference to Fig. 2, we can obtain that Li di di0 = l li0 , (6)

where Li = qi ai denotes a vector pointing from point Ai to Bi , with qi expressed by (3). Then, solving (6) allows the generation of the IDK solutions: di = LT di0 i (LT di0 )2 LT Li + l2 . i i (7)

It is seen that there exist two solutions for each actuator, thus there are total of eight possible solutions for a given platform position and orientation. To enhance the stiness of the manipulator, only the negative square roots are selected to yield a unique set of solutions where the three legs are inclined inward from top to bottom. 2.2 Forward Displacement Kinematics (FDK) Modeling

Given a set of actuated inputs, the position and orientation of the output platform is solved by the forward displacement kinematics (FDK). Traditionally, the FDK problem is solved by considering that the geometric distance between two S joints Bi and Bj is equal to a constant, i.e., Bi Bj = 3 b, i.e., [qi qj ]T [qi qj ] 3b2 = 0, (8) where i = j and i, j = 1, 2, and 3. Equation (8) represents three nonlinear equations, which can be solved by resorting to Sylvester dialytic elimination method [11] or numerical method such as Newton iterative algorithm [10]. However, these approaches are time-consuming and can not be applied to real-time control of a 3-PRS parallel manipulator.

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FDK Calculation Via NN Approach

In this section, the NN is applied to calculate the complicated FDK problems of the 3-PRS PM. 3.1 NN Structure and Setup

It has been shown that multi-layer feedforward network with only one layer of hidden units is sucient to approximate any function provided the activation functions of the hidden units are non-linear [4]. Multi-layer feedforward network with back propagation (BP) learning is used here to solve FDK problem of a 3-PRS PM, and the Levenberg-Marquardt (L-M) training algorithm is adopted to speed up the convergence of the BP learning algorithm, since it has been shown that L-M algorithm is the fastest method for training moderate-sized (up to several hundred weights) feedforward neural networks [3]. The structure of the feedforward neural network is shown in Fig. 3.
Input

Hidden Layer 1
n11
f1

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2 S 2 ,S1

fn

anSn

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S n ,S n

bn S n

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oT

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Fig. 3. Multi-layer feedforward NN structure

In view of the constraint conditions (5), one can obtain the relationships between the constraint and unconstraint variables for the a 3-PRS PM: b px = (1 c2 )c(21 ), 2 b py = (1 c2 )s(21 ), 2 3 = 1 , (9a) (9b) (9c)

where c stands for cosine and s stands for sine functions. The input layer in NN has three nodes which take joint space variables d = [d1 d2 d3 ]T as the input, and the output layer also has three nodes to give the

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independent position and orientation variables X = [pz 1 2 ]T of the moving platform. The number of hidden layers, number of neurons in each layer, transfer function used in each layer, training algorithm, and the performance function are designed parameters for a feedforward neural network. However, there is no basis at all to determine which conguration is the most ecient one for any particular problem. Basically, the numbers of weights and the training time will increase with more neurons in hidden layers. And a large number of hidden units leads to a small error on the training set but not necessarily leads to a small error on the test set. Simulation results in [5] have shown that the performance of the NN with two hidden layers is slightly better. Hence, we use two hidden layers with the neurons of 9 and 11, respectively. That is a moderate-sized network, and the L-M training algorithm is more suitable for training it. The transfer functions used in two hidden layers are all hyperbolic tangent sigmoid transfer function, and the output layer uses linear transfer function. We use mean square error (MSE), which is the average squared error between the network outputs and the target outputs, as the performance function. The weights and biases are randomly initialized. A random generator generates the moving platform vector X within the workspace of the manipulator. The IDK solution described in (7) then gives the actuator variable vector d for any valid X. The data pair is then used to train the network, during which the weights and biases of the network are iteratively adjusted to minimize the network performance function through the errors back propagating process (the back propagation method). Before the training of the network, the inputs and targets are scaled so that they fall within a specied range, which can make the NN training more ecient. Here, the mean and standard deviations of the training set are normalized by normalizing the inputs and targets so that they will have zero mean and unity standard deviation. After the network is trained, the outputs are then converted into the same units that are used for the original targets.
Table 1. Architectural parameters of a 3-PRS PM Parameter a b l Value 400 mm 200 mm 550 mm 30

3.2

NN Training and Results

Considering a 3-PRS PM with the architectural parameters described in Table 1, a total of 1000 pairs of data uniformly distributed within the manipulator workspace are selected to train the 3-layer feedforward network with the MSE performance of 105 . The network is created and trained in Matlab environment using the Neural Network Toolbox, and the training curve is plotted in Fig. 4.

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10 10 Training-Blue Goal-Black 10 10 10 10 10 10

Performance is 9.99933e-006, Goal is 1e-005

-1

-2

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-4

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1500 2000 3005 Epochs

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Fig. 4. Training curve of the NN

To illustrate the eciency of the neural network for solving FDK of the manipulator, the trained NN is employed to the kinematic control of the 3-PRS PM in the following section.

Control Algorithm and Results

Controlling a PM to track trajectories in task space is required for a lot of applications such as welding, spray painting, or laser cutting, etc. Various types of control methods can be employed into the control of a PM. Here, for the sake of demonstrating the eciency of the NN method, we just adopt an ordinary kinematic control algorithm for the tracking control of a 3-PRS PM. The control block diagram is represented in Fig. 5, with reference to which the following equation can be derived. X = Xd + Ke, that is equivalent to e + Ke = 0, (11) where e = Xd X represents the error vector. It has been shown that if K is a positive denite matrix, the system is asymptotically stable [1]. The kinematic control with the aforementioned control algorithm is performed such that the moving platform can track a trajectory given by the following equations: (10)

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d dt
X d (t )
+

X d (t )
+

e(t )

X (t )

J(X )

NN FDK

X (t )

Fig. 5. Block diagram of kinematic control for a 3-PRS PM

pz = 470 + 10 cos(t/10), 1 = sin(t/20), 2 2 = 0.6 sin(t/20).

(12a) (12b) (12c)

The simulation of kinematic control is implemented with Matlab and Simulink software. In the simulation, the matrix gain K is taken as diag{100, 500, 500}. Figure 6 illustrates the simulation results of the tracking in task space. It can be observed that the tracking errors are convergent to steady state values after 0.3 second. In addition, it is seen that the steady state errors for pz , 1 , and 2
460 p (mm) 480 500 520 0 2 1 (rad) 2 4 6 Desired value Estimated value 8 10

2 0 0.5 2 (rad) 0 0.5 1 0

10

4 time (s)

10

Fig. 6. Tracking results for a 3-PRS PM

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are below 0.1 mm, 0.01 rad, and 0.001 rad, respectively, which mean relatively high accuracy. The results imply that the system is stable enough, and the moving platform can track the desired trajectory well, which also validates the eciency of NN in solving the FDK of a 3-PRS PM.

Conclusions

In this paper, the complicated forward displacement kinematics problem of a 3-PRS spatial parallel manipulator is solved by adopting the neural network method. The trained neural network provides a fast and reliable solution to the FDK and makes the real-time control possible for this type of parallel manipulator. Consequently, it is employed to the kinematic control of the manipulator. The simulation results demonstrate both the well performance of the used control algorithm and the eciency of NN approach in solving the FDK problem. The results presented in this paper provide a sound approach for real-time control of a 3-PRS parallel manipulator. Moreover, the method can also be applied to other types of parallel manipulator with complicated forward kinematics problem as well. Our further works will concentrate on NN control of the parallel manipulator with the consideration of dynamic characteristics. Acknowledgments. The authors appreciate the fund support from the research committee of University of Macau under grant no.: RG068/05-06S/LYM/ FST and Macao Science and Technology Development Fund under grant no.: 069/2005/A.

References
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