Spring efficiency assessment and efficient use of spring methods of statically balanced planar serial manipulators with revolute joints only

Abstract. This paper proposes a spring efficiency assessment of a statically spring-balanced planar serial manipulator. The admissible spring configurations for the static balancing of planar serial manipulators without auxiliary links have been determined in the past. Gravity is balanced by the spring configuration systematically; however, the spring configuration also contains counter-effects between springs. Conceptually, with fewer counter-effects between springs, there is less burden on the spring system, which means that the springs are used more efficiently, and accordingly, the system would be safer, and its service life would be longer. In this study, the spring energy is represented in a quadratic form. The coefficients in a quadratic form represent the change in elastic energy with the relative position between links, which is named “elastic pseudo-stiffness”. Compared to the quadratic form of gravity energy, those elastic pseudo-stiffnesses for static balancing are regarded as positive contributions of a spring, while those that contain counter-effects are seen as negative ones. Spring efficiency is defined as the ratio of the elastic pseudo-stiffnesses, which has positive contributions for balancing to total elastic pseudo-stiffnesses. To use springs efficiently, the counter-effects, which are functions of spring parameters, need to be decreased, including spring stiffness and the attachment location of springs on links. A method to use spring efficiently by adjusting spring parameters is developed. Furthermore, it is found that, for a spring attached between adjacent links, the spring efficiency is 100 %, and the spring efficiency decreases while the number of joints over which the spring spans increases. In a spring manipulator system, the efficiency is negatively correlated to the payload. As an example, an efficiency assessment on a 3 degrees of freedom (DOF) manipulator is shown at the end.