The objective of this paper included developing a polar robot (SPBot) for rotating and transferring car engine block (CEB) around and along two different axes in a confined workspace envelope.
The complex transfer operations of the CEB requires sweeping complete surface of the half sphere, and thus a polar robot is best suited to such a task in a confined space. Considering the limited space for this operation, a specially designed manipulator is built comprising 2 degrees of freedom driven by electrical servo motors. Also due to the special form of CEB, an especially designed pneumatic gripper is developed. Kinematics models, static and dynamic equations, together with trajectory planning for such a manipulator are described.
The high‐speed complex transfer in a limited environment is successfully implemented.
The developed polar robot provides for complex transfer operations that significantly increases the speed of the product line and thus reducing the cycle time from 60 s using manpower to just 20 s using the robot.
