Control of a Gantry-Tau Structure

Abstract

Todays, industrial robots don't correspond to the needs of the Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME). Indeed, industrial robots are in many cases too hard to program or too expensive to be used by this kind of enterprises. In order to respond to this need, a European project was created, regrouping five major European robot manufacturers and five leading research institute and universities, named SMErobot. Its main task consists of exploiting the potentials of industrial robots, because they constitute the most flexible existing automation technology. This project set to create a radically new type of robot system, a whole family of SME-suitable robots. A new structure of parallel robots was hence designed to respond to these needs, named a Gantry-Tau structure. A prototype of this parallel kinematic structure was created in the Lund Robotics Laboratory, to test its characteristics and the different control methods that can be applied to it. Moreover, it can be use as a demonstration tool. The thesis project concerns the velocity and position control of the small-scale linear actuators which are used for a prototype of the Gantry-Tau robot.