Force balancing of robotic mechanisms based on adjustment of kinematic parameters

Force balancing is a very important issue in mechanism design and has only recently been introduced to the design of robotic mechanisms. In this paper a force balancing method called adjusting kinematic parameters (AKP) for robotic mechanisms or realtime controllable (RTC) mechanisms is proposed, as opposed to force balancing methods, e.g., the counterweights (CW) method. Both the working principle of the AKP method and the design equation with which to construct a force balanced mechanism are described in detail. A particular implementation of the AKP method for the RTC mechanisms where two pivots on a link are adjustable is presented. A comparison of the two methods, namely the AKP method and the CW method, is made for two RTC mechanisms with different mass distribution. The joint forces and torques are calculated for the trajectory tracking of the RTC mechanisms. The result shows that the AKP method is consistently better than the CW method in terms of the reduction of the joint forces and the torques in the servomotors, and the smoothing of the fluctuation of the joint force.