A comparative study on possible architectural designs of link modules for modular manipulators

Abstract

The conventional manipulator plays an important role in the industries while performing different operations. Since 20th century many researchers have designed several designs and made the task simpler by using conventional manipulator. But in many cases the demand of the industry changes rapidly due to modernization. Whenever this happens the industry needs to change either environment or the manipulator. As changing the environment of industry is costly and time consuming even changing conventional manipulator is not feasible every time, modular manipulators are designed to overcome this issue. The aim of this study is to make the manipulators more flexible by changing the design of the conventional manipulators. In this thesis, two different approaches are used for designing of the modular manipulator. In first approach, bevel gears are used to change the joint angle termed as bevel gear approach whereas in the second approach, helical gears are used to change the joint angle termed as helical gear approach. In both the approaches a subassembly of base and shaft is designed which helps in changing the link twist angle. The variation in link twist angle makes the modular manipulators more flexible than conventional manipulators. For both the approaches, four links are designed having different link lengths which help in changing the link length. Therefore the modular manipulator can be used for variety of applications. The design part of modular manipulator is carried out using SolidWorks. Using both the approaches, 2-link and 4-link modular manipulators are assembled. The static analyses of 2-link modular manipulators are done using ANSYS for different configurations. The dynamic study is also carried out for 2-link and 4-link modular manipulators using SimWise 4D for different configurations. Based on the results obtained the design of links are optimized and dynamic study is carried out again. The results showed significant improvement in the performance of the modified modular manipulators compared to the modular manipulators.