Design and Control of Mechanical Systems

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My research proposal is now broader than the previous one. The fundamental work targeting applications aimed at systems with reduced mobility is well under way. The work ahead along these lines will now focus on the dynamic balancing of a fast pick-and-place (P&P) robot. Work will continue on  two robots that use the two-degree-of-freedom drive (two-dof), dubbed C-drive, that I designed from scratch, based on hard-core theoretical kinematics, in the framework of Lie groups, then went on to the conceptual level, the embodiment, the detailed design, and on to the commissioning. Two identical prototypes have now been mounted on a four-dof robot for fast P&P operations and virtually unlimited rotatability of its gripper, an architecture proposed by a Taiwanese team. The last feature is a major achievement, that aims to respond to a users' challenging feature: a 180-deg rotation capability of the gripper as a minimum. Current commercial systems have responded to this challenge with highly complex mechanisms that are known, off-the-record, to be sources of failure. A second system, currently at the detailed design stage, is a six-dof Stewart-Gough Platform (SGP). Contrary to the standard hexapod architecture of SGPs, mine is a tripod, which was achieved by means of three C-drives. This is a major simplification that will increase the mobility of the platform. In my research work through the years I have identified a bottleneck in the development of robotic and mechatronic systems: the lack of suitable off-the-shelf drives. The mechanical transmissions needed in robotic and mechatronic systems have received much less attention than the system architecture itself. I am thus planning to continue my work on fundamental issues within the design of mechanical transmissions, from linkages to cam mechanisms and on to gear transmissions. I will continue working on all three fronts. More than 10 years ago I initiated, with two European colleagues, work on one fundamental question: Are pairs of gears with skew axes and involute teeth possible? The question was partly answered in a monograph published in 2003, but the gear pairs in question would mesh only with punctual contact between the pair of involute teeth, as opposed to line contact. We are now in the final stages of showing that such gear pairs, with line contact, are possible. The geometry work has thus been laid down, but the engineering research work generated by our fundamental results is enormous. A part of my work in this proposal will be in the development of such gears for industrial applications in collaboration with industry and other Canadian research centres, where the hardware and the software means needed for completion are available. In this work not only graduate students at all  levels, but also undergraduates and technicians will play a key role.