Abstract
Research and equipment testing with golf robots offers much greater control and manipulation of experimental variables compared to tests using human golfers. However, whilst it is acknowledged that the club gripping mechanism of a robot is dissimilar to that of a human, there appears to be no scientific findings on the effects of these gripping differences on the clubhead at ball impact. Theoretical and experimental strain propagation rates from the clubhead to the grip and back to the clubhead were determined during robot testing with a 9-iron to determine if this time interval was sufficiently short to permit the gripping mechanism to have an effect on the clubhead during impact. Longitudinal strain appears to propagate the most quickly, but such deflections are likely to be small and therefore of little meaningful consequence. Shaft bending was not a primary concern as modes of large enough amplitude appear to propagate too slowly to be relevant. Torsional strain propagates at a rate which suggests that constraints at the grip end of a golf club could potentially influence impact dynamics for steel shafted irons; however, this effect seems unlikely to be significant, a likelihood that decreases further for longer irons. As such, it is considered reasonable to treat the influence of a robot’s gripping mechanism on clubhead dynamics at impact as negligible, and therefore comparisons between robot and human data in this regard are valid.
Highlights
Golf robots are an integral part of the process of testing golf clubs as they overcome many of the limitations imposed by player tests
Very little difference was found between the results averaged across all impact locations were 15.6 (±0.4) and 33.5 (±0.6) m·s−1 for 16 and 34 m·s−1 target recorded at the two speeds in terms of contact times
Reasonable agreement has been shown between theoretically calculated strain propagation rates and experimental results collected using an instrumented steel-shafted 9-iron golf club
Summary
Golf robots are an integral part of the process of testing golf clubs as they overcome many of the limitations imposed by player tests. Despite much research into their operation and application, little effort has been dedicated to following up on recommendations to evaluate the effect of the robot gripping mechanism [1,2,3]. The gripping mechanism commonly adopts the form of a rigid ‘clamp’, which has been shown to impose very different constraints on a club’s dynamic response when compared to both human hand-held and freely-suspended conditions [4]. Given the brevity of a typical impact between club and ball in golf, the influence of the shaft on the dynamics of the clubhead during impact has long been considered negligible [5,6,7], there is little empirical evidence to support this assumption. The rigid gripping mechanism will undoubtedly have some effect on the dynamics of the club when considering a robot swing in its entirety, the dynamic response of the.
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