A Hyper-redundant Elephant’s Trunk Robot with an Open Structure:Design,Kinematics,Control and Prototype

As for the complex operational tasks in the unstructured environment with narrow workspace and numerous obstacles,the traditional robots cannot accomplish these mentioned complex operational tasks and meet the dexterity demands.The hyper-redundant bionic robots can complete complex tasks in the unstructured environments by simulating the motion characteristics of the elephant’s trunk and octopus tentacles.Compared with traditional robots,the hyper-redundant bionic robots can accomplish complex tasks because of their flexible structure.A hyper-redundant elephant’s trunk robot(HRETR)with an open structure is developed in this paper.The content includes mechanical structure design,kinematic analysis,virtual prototype simulation,control system design,and prototype building.This design is inspired by the flexible motion of an elephant’s trunk,which is expansible and is composed of six unit modules,namely,3UPS-PS parallel in series.First,the mechanical design of the HRETR is completed according to the motion characteristics of an elephant’s trunk and based on the principle of mechanical bionic design.After that,the backbone mode method is used to establish the kinematic model of the robot.The simulation software SolidWorks and ADAMS are combined to analyze the kinematic characteristics when the trajectory of the end moving platform of the robot is assigned.With the help of ANSYS,the static stiffness of each component and the whole robot is analyzed.On this basis,the materials of the weak parts of the mechanical structure and the hardware are selected reasonably.Next,the extensible structures of software and hardware control system are constructed according to the modular and hierarchical design criteria.Finally,the prototype is built and its performance is tested.The proposed research provides a method for the design and development for the hyper-redundant bionic robot.

Changing law of launching pitching angular velocity of rotating missile

In order to provide accurate launching pitching angular velocity（LPAV） for the exterior trajectory optimization design, multi-flexible body dynamics（MFBD） technology is presented to study the changing law of LPAV of the rotating missile based on spiral guideway. An MFBD virtual prototype model of the rotating missile launching system is built using multi-body dynamics modeling technology based on the built flexible body models of key components and the special force model.The built model is verified with the frequency spectrum analysis. With the flexible body contact theory and nonlinear theory of MFBD technology, the research is conducted on the influence of a series of factors on LPAV, such as launching angle change, clearance between launching canister and missile,thrust change, thrust eccentricity and mass eccentricity, etc. Through this research, some useful values of the key design parameters which are difficult to be measured in physical tests are obtained. Finally,a simplified mathematical model of the changing law of LPAV is presented through fitting virtual test results using the linear regression method and verified by physical flight tests. The research results have important significance for the exterior trajectory optimization design.