Passive Deformable Slim SCARA Robot for Rapid Search in Narrow Spaces

- 2nd Report: Development and Basic Experimentation of a Lightweight, Long Articulated Mechanism with a Restoring Force Distribution to Prevent Buckling during Insertion -

Abstract

Our research group has been developing a flexible and buckling-preventing SCARA robot as a confined-space exploration robot that can be mounted on a quadruped robot. However, the constant restoring torque joint used in the proposed mechanism has a non-functional zone where no restoring torque is generated near the linear state of the joint, which is a factor that reduces stability. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the improvement of the mechanism and its implementation in a quadruped robot. To remove the non-functional zone in the joint mechanism, a joint mechanism using magnetic springs was implemented in an actual machine, and the partial removal of the non-functional zone and the improvement of stability and convergence of joint motion were confirmed through experiments on the actual machine. In addition, we selected composite materials for weight reduction and discussed and designed a reel mechanism to accommodate the proposed mechanism in a compact size.