Abstract
In this paper, a six degree-of-freedom robot arm which is very light but capable of delivering heavy loads was studied. The proposed robot arm has much higher load capacity than conventional robot arms actuated by motors with speed reducers such as the harmonic drive since a new type of robot actuator based on a closed chain mechanism driven by the ball screw was adopted. Analysis on the design scheme and on the mechanism of the joint actuator of the robot arm were made. Since the robot arm was designed very light, it has deflection in the links. To analyze this, a finite element analysis on the structure of the designed robot links was made using ANSYS software. Verifying experiments on the performance of high load capacity of the robot arm was performed by loading heavy weights on the robot arm. Through experiments. the correctness of the numerical analysis was also verified.
