Design of a Non-Back-Drivable Screw Jack Mechanism for the Hitch Lifting Arms of Electric-Powered Tractors

Abstract

The agricultural sector is constantly evolving. The rise in the world’s population generates an increasingly growing demand for food, resulting in the need for the agroindustry to meet this demand. Tractors are the vehicles that have made a real difference in agriculture’s development throughout history, lowering costs in soil tillage and facilitating activities and operations for workers. This study aims to successfully design and build an autonomous, electric agricultural tractor that can autonomously perform recurring tasks in open-field and greenhouse applications. This project is fully part of the new industrial and agronomic revolution, known as Factory 4.0 and Agriculture 4.0. The predetermined functional requirements for the vehicle are its lightweight, accessible price, the easy availability of its spare parts, and its simple, ordinary maintenance. In this first study, the preliminary phases of sizing and conceptual design of the rover are reported before subsequently proceeding to the dynamical analysis. To optimize the design of the various versions of the automated vehicle, it is decided that a standard chassis would be built based on a robot operating inside a greenhouse on soft and flat terrains. The SimScape multi-body environment is used to model the kinematics of the non-back-drivable screw jack mechanism for the hitch-lifting arms. The control unit for the force exerted is designed and analyzed by means of an inverse dynamics simulation to evaluate the force and electric power consumed by the actuators. The results obtained from the analysis are essential for the final design of the autonomous electric tractor.

Multibody Analysis of Sloshing Effect in a Glass Cylinder Container for Visual Inspection Activities

“…For evaluating the free response θ CFD (t) from the CFD analysis, the expression (13) in CFD-Post was implemented. areaInt(Water.VolumeFraction.GradientZ)@Isosur f ace (13) where Isosurface corresponds to the free surface of the liquid. Subsequently, the results were imported in CSV format into Matlab for the calculation of θ.…”

“…In this work, the authors defined a simplified multibody model developed through a CFD analysis to determine the optimal operating conditions for serial manipulators used in visual control stations for glass containers [7][8][9][10][11]. The SimScape multibody multidomain simulation environment is increasingly used in complex systems analysis due to its ability to model the different subdomains that characterize real systems in a single environment [12][13][14]. In this way, the estimation of the dynamic behavior of new systems becomes straightforward, allowing the dimensioning of mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, or other subsystems [15,16].…”

Modeling an Industrial Robotic Manipulator in the Electromechanical Domain

“…Based on their configuration, different types of manipulators can be distinguished. Two macro-categories are mainly used in mechanics: robots with different elements connected in series, called serial robots, and robots with parallel connections, called parallel robots [4,5]. Serial structures, also known in applied mechanics as open kinematic chains, are currently the most widely used in the industry by far.…”