Lightweight Long-Reach 5-DOF Robot Arm for Farm Application

Abstract

Crop monitoring is frequently used by crop scientists to observe growth of plants and to relate plants phenotypes to their genotypes. Instead of traditional crop monitoring, which is labor intensive, high-throughput plant phenotyping (HTP) platforms using ground-based vehicle have several advantages over manual methods. Existing HTP platforms with robot arms has limited reach and payload, and they are sometimes not appropriate for monitoring large fields. In this research, a 5-DOF robot arm is developed and analyzed for monitoring several crops growth. This robot arm is a hybrid of both prismatic and rotational joints. This new mobile manipulator is light, has a compact structure, suitable for plant phenotyping, and doesn’t exist commercially. To investigate the performance of the robot arm, kinematics and dynamics analyses using Newton-Euler iterative method and MATLAB simulations are performed. Results matched with each other very well.

Simplified Approach for Parameter Selection and Analysis of Carbon and Glass Fiber Reinforced Composite Beams

“…This envelope has a rectangular geometry with dimensions of 40 mm × 60 mm. The dimensions of this envelope were chosen to correspond with the dimensions of the aluminum beams used in the robotic manipulator presented in [28]. In Section 3, design charts are developed for laminated composite beams with ply numbers ranging from 4 to 24 with a symmetric and balanced layup.…”

“…The manipulator's tip displacement at the end effector affects the sensors' performance; therefore, the designer is concerned with designing a robot with minimum tip deflections. As mentioned previously, the robot in [28] was fabricated using aluminum and steel materials. To reduce the mass of the structure and beam deflections (i.e., manipulator's tip deflections), in this study, the authors have examined the effectiveness of using laminated composite beams for the materials of the manipulator.…”

“…Robotic manipulators can perform repetitive work at much higher speeds and efficiency than human operators [27]. The steel and aluminum manipulator designed by Zhang et al [28] has a maximum reach of 3 m and can carry weights of up to 15 kg. Even though manipulators constructed using conventional materials (e.g., aluminum and steel) benefit from a high, axial, bending, and torsional stiffness, the mass of the manipulator is also typically high.…”

“…It should be noted that the aluminum robotic arm presented in Figure 10 has a maximum deflection of 2 mm when subjected to a 150 N force in the negative Z-direction at its tip [28]. To improve the performance of the robot and accuracy of sensor measurements, designers can consider increasing the beam stiffness while decreasing the mass using the design charts provided in this paper.…”

Static and Vibration Analyses of a Composite CFRP Robot Manipulator

“…In this paper, thin-walled laminated composite beams were used to modify the structure of a 5-DOF (degrees-of-freedom) robot manipulator [21]. This robot was intended to be used for a crop-monitoring application (phenotyping) and was made of AA and steel materials; as a result, it was relatively heavy and required powerful motors for its operation.…”