Design And Implementation Of A Modular Test System For The Flexible Manipulator

The manipulator is the most typical and common research object in robot reserach field. It can do welding , grinding , coating , assembly , transportation , health care and etc. It can do jobs which require more accuracy but risky for people in the industrial field and even the space environment. Along with the development of robot science and technology, the flexible manipulator dynamics modeling and control strategy are being paid more and more attention to by domestic and foreign experts. Because the flexible manipulator is a model which consists of an infinite number of degrees of freedom and its dynamics modeling process includes discretization of the continuous mode and approximation of numerical calculation , different analytical methods would affect the accuracy and correctness of the results. As for the control strategy , a purely numerical simulation can not explain its reliability. Therefore , the requirement of establishing a test system for the flexible manipulator to measure its key performance, provide the key parameters for dynamic modeling and verify the effectiveness of the control strategy is essential.At the very beginning, this thesis studied the robot joint test systems and flexible manipulator test systems both home and abroad. Then, based on the the flat two-link flexible manipulator in our laboratory, this thesis worked out the design specifications of the test system, and designed the joint test scheme, manipulator test scheme and the arm link modal experiment scheme separately.Secondly, based on the test schemes designed previously and the data acquisition theory, this thesis chose the the real-time sampling method and the bipolar encoding method for the data acquisition system; put forward the idea of setting up a modular data acquisition system, which is made up of multiple sensors, customized data acquisition boards and virtual instrument software. Because the DAQ board is a key component of the data acquisition system, then this thesis described the details of the hardware and software design and USB driver design . The DAQ board integrated twelve ADC channels, two RS232 communication channels, four quadrature encoder input channels and USB communication interface. Besides the full realization of the sensor signal acquisition function and USB communication function, the real-time optimization and error detection and handling are still carefully designed in the software design. In addition, this thesis designed an application layer protocol for the USB communication, in use of checksum error detection method to achieve reliable data transmission.Traditional instruments need human's participation,such as the test data often requires manual recording. Thirdly, to achieve automatic testing , this thesis developed virtual instrument software for the test system. The virtual instrument software has a well-designed man-machine interface and the ability of real-time data acquisition, curve drawing, data display, data storage and etc. Then, this thesis developed a library for application development on the DAQ board. The library provides a comprehensive programming interface, including: finding a board, querying the board address, establishing connection with a board, board configuration, data acquisition, canceling connection and so on.In the end, there is calibration and validation of the test system. The calibration includes sensors calibration, the DAQ board calibration and mechanical calibration. The calibration ensured that the test system achieved the designed specifications. By implementing the joint test, the two-link flexible manipulator test as well as the arm link modal experiment, this thesis verified the validity of the test system and provided the performance parameters of the manipulator.