My main research line is in the kinematic synthesis of articulated bodies, or the function-to-form problem. Kinematic synthesis has been traditionally applied to planar mechanisms (the best-known example being the four-bar linkage) and more recently to spatial robotic systems, including serial and parallel robots. I am interested in the use of Clifford algebras for the analysis and synthesis of systems with spatial motion. This includes the design of robots but also any other moving articulate system, from macromolecules to human motion.

News and Recent Results

  • New!! Research Assistanship positions on robotics with applications to prosthetics and human motion.

    PhD and MS Research Assistanship positions starting this summer in the Measurement and Control Engineering Research Center (MCERC) at Idaho State University. The positions will cover several research areas within biomedical engineering, including robotics, motion identification, etc. See description and application information.

  • Numerical results for the finite-position synthesis of the spatial 4R chain

    [RRRR robot] The finite-position synthesis for the spatial 4R chain is being solved numerically (see numerical solver) for the maximum number of precision positions, which is nine.
    The results seem to indicate that there are many solutions. The figure below shows the number of solutions for up to 7000 runs of the solver; the directions of the four joint axes (left) and the locations for one of the joints (center).

  • New problems for the Java solver

    The Java solver that is used as the general solver in Synthetica 2.0 was designed for the finite-position synthesis of spatial serial chains with precision positions. It is now being tested for degenerate cases (planar, spherical) and for the approximate synthesis with a user-defined tolerance. See more about this topic in Research Lines.

  • Kinematics and dynamics of the human hand

    A dynamic model is being develop to complement the kinematic model of the human hand. This is going to be used for the design of new joints and structures for an artificial hand. See the projects for the kinematic skeleton model (simple Mathematica animation below) and dynamic model under the graduate students link.

  • This layout is based on an example from www.code-sucks.com