Design and Test Analysis of a Solar Array Root Hinge Drive Assembly

A root hinge drive assembly is preferred in place of the classical viscous damper in a large solar array system.It has advantages including better deployment control and higher reliability.But the traditional single degree of freedom model should be improved.A multiple degrees of freedom dynamics model is presented for the solar arrays deployment to guide the drive assembly design.The established model includes the functions of the torsion springs,the synchronization mechanism and the lock-up impact.A numerical computation method is proposed to solve the dynamics coupling problem.Then considering the drive torque requirement calculated by the proposed model,a root hinge drive assembly is developed based on the reliability engineering design methods,and dual actuators are used as a redundancy design.Pseudo-efficiency is introduced and the major factors influencing the（pseudo-）efficiency of the gear mechanism designed with high reduction ratio are studied for further test data analysis.A ground prototype deployment test is conducted to verify the capacity of the drive assembly.The test device consists of a large-area solar array system and a root hinge drive assembly.The RHDA development time is about 43 s.The theoretical drive torque is compared with the test values which are obtained according to the current data and the reduction efficiency analysis,and the results show that the presented model and the calibration methods are proper enough.

Development of a redundant anthropomorphic hydraulically actuated manipulator with a roll-pitch-yaw spherical wrist

The demand for redundant hydraulic manipulators that can implement complex heavy-duty tasks in unstructured areas is increasing;however,current manipulator layouts that remarkably differ from human arms make intuitive kinematic operation challenging to achieve.This study proposes a seven-degree-of-freedom(7-DOF)redundant anthropomorphic hydraulically actuated manipulator with a novel roll-pitch-yaw spherical wrist.A hybrid series-parallel mechanism is presented to achieve the spherical wrist design,which consists of two parallel linear hydraulic cylinders to drive the yaw/pitch 2-DOF wrist plate connected serially to the roll structure.Designed as a 1R£RRR-1S£U mechanism(“R”,“P”,“S”,and“U”denote revolute,prismatic,spherical,and universal joints,respectively;the underlined letter indicates the active joint),the 2-DOF parallel structure is partially decoupled to obtain simple forward/inverse kinematic solutions in which a closed-loop subchain“R£RR”is included.The 7-DOF manipulator is then designed,and its third joint axis goes through the spherical center to obtain closed-form inverse kinematic computation.The analytical inverse kinematic solution is drawn by constructing self-motion manifolds.Finally,a physical prototype is developed,and the kinematic analysis is validated via numerical simulation and test results.