Research on Novel Wire Driving Robot Manipulator for Local Industrial Production Line

The research on robot manipulator is not new topic. However, it is still not easy to localize the manipulator in present writer´s region nowadays. The reason partly comes from the difficulty of reducing the manufacturing cost as well as keeping high displacement accuracy. This paper describes the research on a novel wire driving robot manipulator as a try to substitute low cost, high accuracy and large payload ability localized manipulator for the common production. Generally speaking, as to the design method of robot arms, especially of large used industrial robot manipulators, installing the driving components -such as the electric motors, transmissions and so on -directly just nearby the relative joints, is still normal. The trial model described in this paper is a 4-degree-of-freedom robot manipulator for industrial purpose, which is designed with wire driving mechanism including novel wire tensioner so that the structure becomes compact and simple, the whole weight is dropped, at the same time, the output power to do work and the displacement accuracy are increased relatively. We describe the control system and carry out several experiments to verify performance of this first trial model and expect that could be put into large practical use in future.