Design & Assembly of Modular Manipulators for Constrained Environments

With the rapidly growing demands in robotic applications, there is an importance of developing customized manipulators for serving various operations in different workspaces. Conventional manipulators used today in various industries are restricted to predefined working environments and, as the environment changes to a more cluttered one, it is difficult for those manipulators to operate in the new environment. This book involves the development of a general procedure to design customized manipulators according to the defined workspace. In this book, the worst configuration corresponding to each joint is first determined on the basis of maximum torque requirements for selection of the joint actuators. Based on the specified material properties and the load acting on the link, the dimension of links have been calculated. For assembly of the designed links, connectors have been designed on the basis of end points of the links being connected. The results have been shown for different configuration of modular manipulators according to the defined workspace.