Research and Development of Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (2nd Report)

Abstract

The Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) is a newly developed robot for the use of small-lot batch assembly. In the previous report the characteristics of selective compliance effect were discussed and the experimental results on insertion were shown. The robot is controlled by an 8-bit microcomputer. In this report the hardware and the software of the controller are discussed. An arbitrary motion curve similar to a cam curve is used to move arms, and two axes are driven synchronously by the softwared DDA. Thus smooth movement is obtained. The results on repeating positioning accuracy, residual vibration and acceleration characteristics are shown. In spite of utilizing a low level microcomputer, the robot could obtain a sufficient speed up to 0.5 m/s which almost corresponds to the speed of a human operator.