The MANUS wheelchair-mounted manipulator: system design and implementation

MANUS is a compact wheelchair-mounted manipulator. A reconfigurable man-machine interface has been developed to adapt MANUS to the wishes of all possible users. To facilitate the control of the manipulator by the user, algorithms have been implemented for the transformation of the movements in Cartesian or polair co-ordinates in displacements of the joint angles. By choosing a control structure with a Jacobean transformation, part of the path planning is inherently performed. First user experiments indicated the need for high manipulator resolution which will be realized by using adaptive and non-linear servo-controllers.