An experimental setup and procedure for stiffness evaluation of robot manipulators

Abstract

In this paper, an experimental test setup for stiffness evaluation of a spatial parallel mechanism is introduced. The parallel mechanism used in this study is R-CUBE mechanism. In the test setup, a highly rigid gantry-type manipulator’s end-effector is coupled with the R-CUBE’s mobile platform. As the gantry manipulator is actuated the resultant reaction forces/moments are measured via a force\torque sensor. Subsequently, compliant displacements of R-CUBE are measured by using a coordinate measuring machine. The obtained results are presented and discussed in this paper. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.