Abstract not available

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology / Department of Electromechanical Engineering

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology / Department of Electromechanical Engineering

This work follows the design, prototyping and implementation of an automatic part loading and unloading system for use in thread rolling of aerospace fasteners. The thread rolling automation system is designed to function as part of a multi-process workcell, which emphasizes adaptability and ease of implementation. Design of the thread rolling automation facilitates the development of a universal gripping system, which is designed to grasp a large variety of fastener styles and sizes with a minimum of tooling changeover. A novel grasping model is developed to predict the error tolerance of the proposed gripping system design, which is validated experimentally. The proposed gripper and automation system are prototyped and tested, and shown to perform reliably with a wide range of fastener types.

published_or_final_version / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Technology today has progressed to the point that the true potential of robotics is beginning to be realized. However, programming robots to be robust across varied environments and objectives, in a way that is accessible and intuitive to most users, is still a difficult task. There remain a number of unmet needs. For example, many existing solutions today are proprietary, which makes widespread adoption of a single solution difficult to achieve. Also, most approaches are highly targeted to a specific implementation. But it is not clear that these approaches will generalize to a wider range of problems and applications. To address these issues, we define the Interaction Space, or the space created by the interaction between robots and humans. This space is used to classify relevant existing work, and to conceptualize these unmet needs. GTax, a knowledge transfer framework, is presented as a solution that is able to span the Interaction Space. The framework is based on SysML, a standard used in many different systems, which provides a formalized representation and verification. Through this work, we demonstrate that by generalizing across the Interaction Space, we can simplify robot programming and enable knowledge transfer between processes, systems and application domains.

The wrench capability of a manipulator is defined as the maximum forces and moments that can be applied (or sustained) by the manipulator. Understanding these kinetostatic performances of a manipulator is crucial in design and control of manipulators. A novel analytical methodology for the determination of the force and moment capabilities of non-redundantly and redundantly actuated planar parallel manipulators is presented. This new methodology is compared to a previous methodology that used optimization and it is shown that the new methodology is computationally more efficient and yields more accurate results. Based on this methodology. five force and moment capability indices are proposed. The proposed indices are used to generate the wrench capabilities of nine different non-redundantly and redundantly actuated planar parallel manipulator architectures.