地上重力下で機能検証が可能なトラスビーム組立機械の開発

抄録

An unique automatic truss beam builder was developed in this study, whose functions can be verified easily at the gravity condition on the ground. This beam builder has vertically symmetric mechanisms, and extends two octahedral truss beams simultaneously by symmetric motions. The energy loss against the gravity and the gain from the gravity are compensated via inner forces of the mechanical elements. This condition is similar to the weightlessness in terms of the energy consumption. The advantage of this compensation method is that this beam builder compensates the energy cansumption due to the gravity by simple mechanisms by itself, and requires no other complex facilities, such as a suspension system by tension controlled cables or a neutral buoyancy pool. When this method is applied to developing and verifying space robots, the energy consumption and the working speed in the weightlessness will be estimated more easily, more inexpensively and more quickly.