Design and Development of a Three-Link Rigid-Flexible Manipulator

In this paper, a three-link rigid-flexible manipulator has been designed and developed for high-speed operations. The manipulator features one prismatic joint and two revolute joints to obtain the three-dimensional workspace. Before fabrication of the real setup, CAD (computer-aided design) model was built, and analysis was done to get an optimized structural design. Both the rotating links can translate together in vertical direction using the prismatic joint. The motor for the second rotating link is placed on the main structure, and a belt was used to transfer the rotation, which makes the experimental setup unique compared to those available in the literature. The full workspace analysis of the fabricated setup is done experimentally and theoretically. The setup is fabricated for high-speed operations while minimizing the vibrations. The motors inputs are PWM (pulse width modulation) signals and angle required to turn. The workspace is traced at very low speed to avoid deformation effect. The tip acceleration while rotating first link to 90 degrees by varying the PWM is also obtained using both rotating links attached.