Design of concentric driven serial chain robot wrist

Abstract

Robots wrist configurations existing till today are either remotely actuated or by attaching driving mechanism directly to the joint. Human wrist has a special advantage of having the muscles powering it located in the forearm, resulting in its small size, but the robots wrists are larger in size due to the existing constraints of powering source to be located within the wrist itself. To overcome this constraint, for applications of robots in surgical application, defense, nuclear industry etc scientists are working towards developing wrists of smaller sizes. In continuation of this effort towards developing miniaturized wrists, this project aims to design a wrist that’s remotely actuated & being operated by a single motor, leading to reduction in overall size of the wrist. This design is used to develop 3-DOF wrist with remote actuation of Y-P-R motion using single motor & various sets of Bevel gear arrangements & clutches.