Robotica

Table of Contents - July 2012 - Volume 30, Issue 04  

Articles

Kinematic coupling complexity of heavy-payload forging manipulator

Xiaobing Chua1 and Feng Gaoa1 c1

a1 State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, P. R. China

SUMMARY

There exist several kinds of definitions for complexity in different areas. In mechanical engineering area, some formulations capable of measuring the complexity of robotic architectures have been proposed at the conceptual-design stage. This paper presents the definition of Kinematic Coupling Complexity to measure the kinematic coupling degree of a manipulator based on the input/output velocity matrix. In order to distinguish the differences among many matrixes, three factors will be considered including the proportion of nonzero elements in matrix J, the difference of nonzero elements' numbers in every row among many matrixes, and the difference of nonzero elements' positions among many matrixes. To illustrate the methods introduced in this paper, four types of heavy-payload forging manipulators are analyzed and the type of forging manipulator with the smallest Kinematic Coupling Complexity is chosen as our prototype.

(Accepted July 21 2011)

(Online publication August 26 2011)

KEYWORDS:

  • Kinematic coupling complexity;
  • Forging manipulator;
  • Input/output velocity relationship

Correspondence:

c1 Corresponding author. E-mail: chuxiaobing@gmail.com