Design development of a Smart Drive for Atypical Manipulators

In modern industrial robotics, manipulators play a key role in ensuring uninterrupted production and automation, ensuring the required characteristics when working with movable objects. They make it possible to replace a person in monotonous operations, speed up the production process and avoid the use of additional lifting devices. Unlike traditional manipulators, continuous manipulators, with their unique capabilities, have unresolved control problems. One of them is to control the shape of the links of the continuous manipulator, as it ultimately determines its operating point. In this paper, we consider a continuous manipulator consisting of links based on rigid elements with a spherical surface, the rolling of which relative to each other determines the conical shape of the links. The rolling of the elements is carried out by means of drives by changing the lengths of the cables passing through them. For the correct (controlled) operation of the manipulator, it is necessary to control the movement of cables while simultaneously controlling their tension. In addition, to maintain the integrity of the links, the control must be synchronous for all cable drives. The main purpose of the presented work is to develop a draft design of a smart drive for atypical manipulators. At the first stage of the work, the results of which are presented in this article, a design study of the drive was carried out, for which the following three tasks were solved: designing a drive module based on a stepper motor with a cable tension and displacement sensor; developing an information system architecture; designing the internal structure of a programmable logic integrated circuit (FPGA). The circuit developed at the first (design) stage of creating the sketch design of the smart drive was loaded into the internal flash memory of the FPGA.