Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : June 05, 2019 - June 08, 2019
Recently long reach articulated manipulator is widely required for infrastructure inspection. Long reach manipulator can be realized by using thrusters for weight compensation. In this research, we propose a super long reach manipulator with weight compensation and joint drive by thrusters. Considering the static influence of weight and its longitudinal direction moment of the manipulator, the force required for each thruster was obtained analytically. The result of the analysis showed that the weight compensation force is constant, but the longitudinal direction moment caused by the weight depends on the arm posture. After that, we designed a system which controls joint angle with the simple PID controller and the feedforward term, and confirmed its validity by dynamic simulation of the 2 units model. Moreover, we developed 2 units prototype whose length was 4.3 meters and confirmed its basic motion.
