Spring‐assisted gantry robots versus conventional gantry robots: spring constant optimization and work minimization

Abstract

The spring‐assisted gantry robots, described in this paper, were designed primarily for the rapid transfer of lightweight objects from one point to another, e.g. to pick objects from a conveyor belt and to place them in a box. The average amount of work required for pick‐and‐place operations carried out by a conventional gantry robot was decided. Springs were added to conserve the kinetic energy of the main bar, which slides in the X‐direction and the work of the same pick‐and‐place operation was decided. A theoretical study showed that when the spring constant was optimized the required motor work of the spring‐assisted robots were 42–95 percent less than the required work of the conventional robot. The conceptual robot exists in mathematical models in Matlab and SIMULINK.

Citation

Grahn, S. and Johansson, G. (2002), "Spring‐assisted gantry robots versus conventional gantry robots: spring constant optimization and work minimization", Industrial Robot, Vol. 29 No. 1, pp. 53-60. https://doi.org/10.1108/01439910110410060