Vibration Analysis of Flexible Composite Manipulator

Abstract

Flexible Manipulators are promising in field of robotics, it provide a prominent replacement for rigid manipulators which consume more power, response time is slower and due to mass moment inertia difficult to maneuver. On the other hand Flexible Manipulators being light in weight consume less power, response time is also fast, and being light weight there is no problem of mass moment inertia so safe in operations. However in using flexible manipulators in operations some difficulties are faced. The main drawback while using flexible manipulator is its residual vibration produced due to its light weight. By choosing appropriate material as manipulator and using proper control techniques the effect of vibration such as vibration amplitude and vibration settling time can be decreased. Flexible materials are being used in many fields such as space, underwater as well as high speed energy efficient manipulation. Here vibration analysis is done on three types of single link flexible manipulators i.e. aluminum, Kevlar epoxy composite and graphite epoxy composite. Many researches have been done on modelling of the flexible manipulator using finite element procedures and thus this thesis is done to analyze vibrational property of manipulator for different materials and finally concluded which type of flexible manipulator gives best result