Modeling of a Timing-Belt Drive System Used in a Large-Scale Panel-Handling Robot

Abstract

Most of large scale solar panel handling robots adopt the timing-belt drive system for its driveline because of the simplicity and the easiness of implementation. The vibration caused by the flexure of the timing belt would increase as the size and the weight of the panel that the robot handles increase and the vibration would deteriorate the precision and/or productivity of the whole robot system. For the development of a proper control system and for the improvement of the design of the robot it is important to estimate the oscillatory response of the robot system including the flexible drive system properly. In this paper a flexible multi-body dynamics model of a large-scale solar-panel-handling robot with the flexible timing-belt drive system is developed using a generic multi-body dynamics analysis program, RecurDyn.