Year

1992

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Abstract

Robot manipulators have the inherent characteristics of being highly non linear and strongly coupled. The recent increasing demand for industrial robots compounded with their high complexity has provided the robot's designers with a new challenging and time-consuming problem. The reason behind it is that a robot's designer cannot easily predict the effect of changing an operational condition or a geometrical parameter on the dynamic performance.

In this dissertation a comprehensive study was conducted to analyse the dynamic characteristics of robot manipulators under different operational condi tions and various structural and geometrical configurations. Therefore, both kine matic and dynamic modelling were extensively used in both iterative and closed form. The analysis was applied on two types of widely-used industrial robots: a) a SCARA type robot and b) articulated robots.

The results of the study are aimed at giving further insight into robot dynamic performance in pursuit of an optimal robot's design. That is achievable since the results are also aimed at helping a robot's designer to foresee the effect of changing an operational condition (e.g. velocity or payload) or a geometrical parameter (e.g.a joint's twist angle ora link's length). In this research, a computer plot package was especially developed and used to display the extensive analysis information in a compact form. This helps a robot's designer develop an intuitive feel for his problem and reinforces this by a visual display.

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Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.