Research And Design Of The Landscape Hedge Trimmer Manipulator

Nowadays, in China, the hedges trimming mainly relies on kinds of hand-held hedge trimmers and scissors, which is labor-intensive and inefficient. And pruning efficiency is completely determined by the skill of workers. For the above shortcomings, this paper studied on a neoteric landscape hedge trimmer manipulator, which used cylindrical coordinate structure as the program and could trim various shapes of the hedges and trees automatically.In this paper, Virtual prototype technique and experimental studies was combined to study the hedge trimmer manipulator. We determined the operating parameters of the trimmer’s cutter and used it to test cutting resistance during the cutting process on the cutter test platform we constructed, which supports a hedge trimmer manipulator for design and analysis. Each parts of the trimming manipulator were three-dimensionally designed and virtually assembled with the help of Pro/E software. Secondly, the finite element stress analysis was carried out on the trimming manipulator in order to ensure it had sufficient strength and stiffness. Analysis through finite element modal kept its natural frequency from the vibration frequency of ground and trimming blades. Finally, after establishing the kinematics equation and the modeling trajectory equation of the trimming manipulator, the trimming manipulator’s kinematics and dynamics simulation based on Pro/E and ADAMS co-simulation technology was carried out, which not only verified the correctness of the kinematics equations and the modeling trajectory equation, but also obtained the driving force of each motion joint and the drive speed by the simulation of semi-circular ball and cylindrical trimming under two working conditions.In addition, in order to avoid large load that would cause damage to the trimming manipulator while working, this paper designed a novel overload protection mechanism and its structural parameters were optimized to make the output torque characteristics of the overload protection mechanism decrease monotonically to reach reasonable protective effect. The physical prototype was developed after selection of parts and components and analysis of the manipulator’s ability to resist overturning. This prototype showed that the joint driving force was sufficient and there was no movement interference. With actual cutting test on the physical prototypes, it indicated that the efficiency of the modeling process was6to10times faster than relatively artificial pruning and more than100times to the artificial pruning. Furthermore the trimming effect was favorable, and the trimmed hedges were all neatly. The hedge trimmer had been displayed in the China-ASEAN Expo and the Guangxi Science and Technology Exhibition and won acceptance of people from all walks of life and various media. The hedge trimmer manipulator had been applied for several invention patent.