A typical serial manipulator consists of a servo motor, a serial mechanism and an independent joint placed between the motor and the serial mechanism. Both the time-varying characteristics of the inertia of the serial mechanism and the flexibility characteristics of the independent joint are widely found in serial manipulator servo drive systems. These two characteristics not only increase the resonance magnitude of serial manipulators, but also affect the dynamic characteristics of the system. In order to obtain a stable output speed of serial manipulators, the variable parameters of a PI control strategy is applied to a serial manipulator servo drive system. Firstly, dynamic model of a serial manipulator servo drive system is established based on a two-inertia system. Then the transfer function from motor speed to motor electromagnetic torque is derived by the state-space equation. Furthermore, the parameters of the PI controller are designed and optimized utilizing three different pole assignment strategies with the identical radius, the identical damping coefficients, and the identical real parts. The results indicate that a serial manipulator servo drive system can obtain good dynamic characteristics by selecting parameters of the PI controller appropriately.

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Gravity and flexibility will cause fluctuations of the rotation angle in the servo system for flexible manipulators. The fluctuation will seriously affect the motion accuracy of end-effectors. Therefore, this paper adopts a control method combining the RBF (Radial Basis Function) neural network and pole placement strategy to suppress the rotation angle fluctuations. The RBF neural network is used to identify uncertain items caused by the manipulator’s flexibility and the time-varying characteristics of dynamic parameters. Besides, the pole placement strategy is used to optimize the PD (Proportional Differential) controller’s parameters to improve the response speed and stability. Firstly, a dynamic model of flexible manipulators considering gravity is established based on the assumed mode method and Lagrange’s principle. Then, the system’s control characteristics are analyzed, and the pole placement strategy optimizes the parameters of the PD controllers. Next, the control method based on the RBF neural network is proposed, and the Lyapunov stability theory demonstrates stability. Finally, numerical analysis and control experiments prove the effectiveness of the control method proposed in this paper. The means and standard deviations of rotation angle error are reduced by the control method. The results show that the control method can effectively reduce the rotation angle error and improve motion accuracy.

The length of flexible manipulators with a telescopic arm alters during movement. The dynamic parameters of telescopic flexible manipulators exhibit significant time-varying characteristics owing to variations in length. With an increase in the manipulators’ length, the nonlinear terms caused by flexibility in the manipulators’ dynamic equations cannot be ignored. The time-varying characteristics and nonlinear terms of telescopic flexible manipulators cause fluctuations in rotation angles, which affect the operation accuracy of end-effectors. In this study, a control strategy based on a combination of fuzzy adjustment and an RBF neural network is utilized to improve the control accuracy of flexible telescopic manipulators. First, the dynamic equation of the manipulators is established using the assumed mode method and Lagrange’s principle, and the influence of nonlinear terms is analyzed. Subsequently, a combined control strategy is proposed to suppress the fluctuation of the rotation angle in telescopic flexible manipulators. The variation ranges of the feedforward PD controller parameters are determined by the pole placement strategy and length of the manipulators. Fuzzy rules are utilized to adjust the controller parameters in real-time. The RBF neural network is utilized to identify and compensate the uncertain part of the dynamic model of the flexible manipulators. The uncertain part comprises time-varying parameters and nonlinear terms. Finally, numerical simulations and prototype experiments prove the effectiveness of the combined control strategy. The results prove that the proposed control strategy has a smaller standard deviation of errors. Therefore, the combined control strategy is more suitable for telescopic flexible manipulators, which can effectively improve the control accuracy of rotation angles.

A power line inspection robot has to overcome many kinds of obstacles in inspection processes. The strain clamp is the obstacles difficult for inspection robots to overcome. The inspection robot needs to have a particular climbing ability to overcome the strain clamp. Therefore, the ability to climb power lines is the key point of the inspection robot’s design. An inspection robot with retractable double serial manipulators is proposed to improve the climbing and obstacle-crossing ability. Besides, this paper shows that the inspection robot is more suitable for climbing from static analysis and dynamic evaluation index. Firstly, the obstacle-crossing processes and structures of the inspection robot are introduced. Next, the static analysis is carried out when inspection robot climbs the power lines. The static analysis shows that the new inspection robot has a smaller driving torque. What’s more, the dynamic model of the inspection robot is established by Lagrange’s dynamical equations. By constructing the dynamic evaluation indexes, the inspection robot with retractable arms performs better dynamic characteristics. Finally, a prototype robot is carried out to cross obstacles and climb up power lines. The results show that the inspection robot can overcome different obstacles and has a good climbing performance.

In this paper, the dynamics of the vehicle suspension system under the random excitation and the periodic excitation are investigated. To improve the damping performance of the vehicle suspension system, a two stage ISD suspension with “Inerter-Spring-Damper” in each stage is proposed based on electromechanical similarity theory. A vehicle dynamic model with two stage ISD suspension is established in this paper. The dynamic equation is solved by the Runge-Kutta method and the dynamic response of the whole vehicle system is obtained. Taking the traditional suspension as the comparison object, the dynamic characteristics of the system under random excitation and periodic excitation are studied in the time domain, and the suppression effect of the suspension designed in this paper on the resonance peak is verified in the frequency domain. The influence of the inertia coefficient on the damping performance of the vehicle suspension system is analyzed. The effects of excitation amplitude and vehicle speed on ride comfort improvement of vehicle system with two stage ISD suspension are discussed respectively. The results show that, the resonance peak values of body acceleration, dynamic travel of rear suspension and rear tire dynamic load frequency response are reduced by 59.1%, 21.6%, and 60.3% respectively. With the increase of excitation amplitude in the range of 0.02–0.04 m, the ride comfort improvement of two stage ISD suspension system is always more than 61%. With the increase of vehicle speed in the range of 10–25m/s, the performance improvement rate of two stage ISD suspension system can reach more than 34.1%.

Harmonic gear reducer is widely used in industrial robots, aerospace, optics, and other high-end fields. The failure of harmonic gear reducer is mainly caused by the damage of flexible bearing and flexspline of thin-walled vulnerable components. To study the contact mechanical characteristics of flexible components such as flexible bearing and flexspline in harmonic gear reducer, the contact mechanical model of flexible bearing, vibration differential equation of flexspline, and finite element model of each component in harmonic gear reducer were established. Based on the established model of harmonic gear reducer, the influence of the length of flexspline cylinder and the thickness of cylinder bottom on the stress of flexspline is discussed, respectively, and the motion characteristics of flexible bearing are studied. At the same time, the spatial distribution of the displacement of the flexspline and the axial vibration response of the flexspline are studied. The correctness of the model established in this paper is verified by experiments. The results show that the increase of cylinder length can improve the stress of flexspline in harmonic gear reducer; the wall thickness of cylinder bottom mainly affects the stress at the bottom of flexspline but has little effect on the stress of gear ring and smooth cylinder. Along the axis direction of the flexspline, the radial displacement, circumferential displacement, and angular displacement increase linearly with the increase of the axial distance between the cylinder and the bottom. When the excitation frequency is high, the vibration mode of flexspline shell is mainly axial vibration. The research results will provide a theoretical reference for the optimal design of harmonic gear reducer and improving the service life of flexible parts.