Structure synthesis and workspace analysis of a telescopic spraying robot

Abstract

Spraying robot is a kind of important industrial equipments. However most of them cannot flexibly change their workspace. In order to obtain a spraying robot with extremely large workspace but a small storage space, we synthesize an innovative mobile robot with a telescopic forearm. First, the structure of a four-side deployable arm to generate straight line motion for the mobile robot is proposed. It adequately enlarges the workspace and reduces the storage space because of the stretchable structure. Based on the new structure, the homogeneous transformation matrix and Jacobian matrix of the forward and inverse kinematics are deduced in details for workspace evaluation. Geometry analysis indicates that the four-side deployable structure effectively extends the arm of the robot, and therefore it has much larger workspace than its existing counterparts do.