A Survey of Mechanism and Robot with Clearances

Abstract

With the requirement of high velocity and high precision, the influences of pair and joint clearances on the kinematic and dynamic performances of mechanism and robot should not be ignored. Much achievement is made in the researches of mechanism with clearance, but there are few reports about researches of robot with clearance.In this paper, we reviewed the evolution of mechanism and robot with clearances and classified these researches into several aspects: modeling based on different methods; occurrence of contact loss; kinematic and dynamic analysis, chaos phenomena and experiments; synthesis research of clearance and friction. Only one clearance was taken into account in most of the literatures. Multi-clearances result in divergence of the numerical solutions. Effective solutions should be developed to solve the dynamic equations. With the development of new experimental methods, synthesis research of clearance should be done and gas or liquid lubricating should be adopted. Chaos phenomena need to be studied further.