Concept And Design Of A Spherical Joint Mechanism For Service Robots
Tim Froehlich, Ulrich J. Reiser, Felix Meßmer, Alexander W. Verl · Procedia Manufacturing · 2018
Robots in daily human environments need to fulfill a lot of requirements and boundary conditions to be accepted and useful. To meet these, in this paper, a mechanism similar to a spherical joint is proposed and compared to others. It can be used to extend the workspace of manipulators and add a wide coverage for sensors mounted on the head of the system while being safe by design and enabling an agile and expressive display of gestures. Beside a generic description of the geometry and the main dimensions of the mechanism, also the kinematic calculation and properties of the workspace are shown and discussed.