Design and workspace characterisation of malleable robots
File(s)
Author(s)
Clark, Angus
Rojas, Nicolas
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
For the majority of tasks performed by traditionalserial robot arms, such as bin picking or pick and place, onlytwo or three degrees of freedom (DOF) are required for motion;however, by augmenting the number of degrees of freedom,further dexterity of robot arms for multiple tasks can beachieved. Instead of increasing the number of joints of a robotto improve flexibility and adaptation, which increases controlcomplexity, weight, and cost of the overall system, malleablerobots utilise a variable stiffness link between joints allowing therelative positioning of the revolute pairs at each end of the linkto vary, thus enabling a low DOF serial robot to adapt acrosstasks by varying its workspace. In this paper, we present thedesign and prototyping of a 2-DOF malleable robot, calculatethe general equation of its workspace using a parameterisationbased on distance geometry—suitable for robot arms of variabletopology, and characterise the workspace categories that theend effector of the robot can trace via reconfiguration. Throughthe design and construction of the malleable robot we exploredesign considerations, and demonstrate the viability of theoverall concept. By using motion tracking on the physical robot,we show examples of the infinite number of workspaces thatthe introduced 2-DOF malleable robot can achieve.
Date Issued
2020-09-15
Date Acceptance
2020-01-21
Citation
2020, pp.9021-9027
Publisher
IEEE
Start Page
9021
End Page
9027
Copyright Statement
© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197439
Source
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2020-05-31
Finish Date
2020-06-04
Coverage Spatial
Paris, France
Date Publish Online
2020-09-15