The Geometric Design of Spherical Mechanical Linkages with Differential Task Specifications: Experimental Set Up and Applications

Abstract

The thesis focuses on the development of an experimental set up for a recently developed failure recovery technique of spatial robot manipulators. Assuming a general configuration of the spatial robot arm, a task is specified. This task contains constraints on position, velocity and acceleration to be satisfied. These constraints are derived from contact and curvature specifications. The technique synthesizes the serial chain and tests if the task can be satisfied in case of a joint failure. An experimental set up was developed in order to validate the failure recovery technique. It includes a robot arm mounted on a movable platform. The arm and platform are controlled by NI sbRIO board and are programmed in LabVIEW. The experimental results of the failure recovery technique were obtained for the case of Elbow failure in robot manipulators. The thesis considers two applications of the synthesis of spherical five –degree-of-freedom serial chains: Power assist for human therapeutic movement and Synthesis of Parallel Mechanical Linkages. A spherical TS chain has been synthesized for these two applications using the Mathematica software.