Structure Design Fused with Electronic Devices of Holonic Manipulator

Abstract

A holonic manipulator has many electronic devices such as control computers and sensors among its local mechanical components. This kind of manipulator design has three major advantages: reduction of wire harness between devices, high software productivity, and fault tolerability of the system. In this paper, we first represent two actually developed holonic manipulators. Then we compose a simple structural model of the manipulator focusing particularly on the constituent component mass so that the efficiency ratio of payload mass to total manipulator mass can be analyzed. This efficiency ratio exhibits a saturated increase consistent with the payload mass, which is due to DC servomotor mass/power characteristics and mechanical structure mass/stress characteristics. For the improvement of the efficiency ratio, the fused structure design has been employed mainly between heat sinks or support members of the computer and mechanical structure. The achieved improvement is estimated with the model using a mass fusion function.