Analysis of a seven link robot gripper with an integrated piezoelectric actuation system

Robot gripper design is an active research area due to its wide spread applicability in automation. The present work deals with the actuator analysis of a non-linear, multi-modal and multi-objective optimization problem which is originally formulated by Osyczka [1]. The previous work [1] had treated the actuator as a blackbox. In the present work, the formulation has been changed by incorporating actuator analysis into the robotic gripper problem. The piezoelectric actuating system is modeled as a stack consisting of the individual actuator elements arranged in series and parallel, leading to four different cases. With the incorporation of voltage as an input (it is related to both the actuator force and the manipulator displacement), the problem becomes more realistic and can be integrated with any real life situation. The relationships connecting the force developed and the voltage applied are arrived at by using the basic constitutive equations and the geometry of the problem. The future work aims to take up an existing optimization problem with actuator analysis and make it more realistic and wider in scope, by incorporating actuator analysis into it.