Design and development of a concentric driven serial chain manipulator

Abstract

Now-a-days, industrial robot is been custom made by various companies which serves companies of different sectors in fulfilling the very specific demand, such as welding, painting, fabricating microchips, etc. Usually these robots are provided with actuators at each joint for simplicity and reliability. This paper introduces a new concept of a concentric driven serial chain manipulator where only one motor is used to supply the power required by the robot to do all the required motion or it’s a uni-motor robot or manipulator.
The sole idea is to power the manipulator by a single servo motor, which will enable motion to each joint, but one at a time. An auto clutch system is designed, so that the requirement of additional costly electromagnetic clutches is totally eliminated. Such a design configuration of the manipulator has an obvious advantage on design reliability, cost saving and easy maintenance. This project includes a new mechanical drive to achieve the required power transmission and subsequently new locking design for the joints. The manipulator is modeled and simulated over CATIA V5 R21 software to test the kinematics of the manipulator components.