Flexible Robots - A Survey

Industrial robots and handling devices will be of great importance in future. Today robots are used for various purposes in different industries. Main disadvantages of the robots used today are the very heavy construction, the relatively slow speed and the “unintelligence”. Therefore the next generation of robots will be more “intelligent”. Such robots have to be equipped with external sensors giving them additional information about their surroundings. In addition these robots will be faster and therefore they have to be lightweight constructions. The last two features will lead to socalled “flexible” robots which are very complicated to describe mathematically and to control The paper starts with a short description of the main parts of an industrial robot. After some general considerations on the construction of lightweight robots, some methods for the mechanical modelling of flexible robot structures are discussed and compared. Based on these various models for the dynamic behavior an overview of possible control methods and strategies is given