Gravity-balancing of spatial robotic manipulators

This paper describes the underlying theory of gravity balanced spatial robotic manipulators through a hybrid strategy which uses springs in addition to identification of the center of mass using auxiliary parallelograms. A significant contribution of this paper is to show that springs with fixed ends are sufficient to gravity balance a spatial mechanism if the hybrid method of gravity balancing is used where the center of mass is identified first through auxiliary parallelograms. Also, the system remains gravity balanced even if the orientation of the base is changed, i.e., the direction of the gravity is changed with respect to the base. Although the method can be applied to n link spatial serial manipulators, we apply the method for gravity compensation of two and three degrees-of-freedom (DOF) spatial manipulators. A prototype with the underlying principles of this paper was fabricated at the University of Delaware. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.