A Closed-Chain Ship Welding Robot: Design, Singularity and Dexterity

Traditional ship welding robots generally have poor carrying capacity, large inertia, big error accumulation and poor dynamic performance in industrial production, a closed-chain ship welding robot manipulator based on multi-DOF (Degree-of-Freedom) mechanism is presented to solve above problems. The kinematics model was developed to analysis the velocity characteristics of the manipulator by closed-loop vector method. Then, the singularity configurations were describe based on Jacobian matrix method, workspace was discussed under non-singularity conditions, and the kinematic characteristics were disclosed. Finally, through the velocity Jacobian matrix, an evaluation model for the performance of the proposed novel mechanism was proposed. Results show that the closed-chain shipbuilding welding robot has high dexterity, fast response, a strong engineering application prospect, which can meet the requirements of ship welding process well.