Dynamical Modeling of Flexible Linear Robots Available to Purchase

The production sector aims towards increasing capacity and energy efficiency. A possibility to achieve this is the usage of manipulators built of lightweight structures in order to raise the maximum velocity, acceleration and payload. This leads to an elastic robot that tends to vibrate. The main focus of this paper is the modeling of a fast moving, elastic robot with three linear axes. These axes are connected by four flexible links driven by synchronous motors with elastic gear racks and bearing elasticities. The Projection Equation in subsystem form is used to calculate the dynamic model. This equation in combination with a Ritz approximation for the flexible links, which are modeled as Rayleigh beams, leads to a set of highly nonlinear ordinary differential equations. The usage of the Projection Equation in subsystem form simplifies the modeling of this system and offers the possibility of a fast numerical integration supported by the Maple^® packages SimCode2, SimSubs and SimRecursive. The subsystems of the elastic bodies are assembled by the kinematical chain. This leads to the possibility to evaluate the minimal accelerations of the system by a recursive scheme with O(n) efficiency. These results for the endpoint (position and acceleration) of the complete elastically modeled robot are compared to experimental measurements.