Development and verification of a 2-link flexible serial arm testbed for 3D spatial movements

For several decades, researchers have known that flexible serial robot arms have several benefits over rigid arms, such as lower costs, increased throughput, and improved safety. However, industry has been reluctant to move towards using flexible robots. There are numerous modeling techniques and controller approaches for flexible robots that have never been validated on hardware. There have been several single link or planar multi-link testbeds created over the years, but only a handful of multi-link spatial serial flexible arm testbeds. This paper presents the development of a 2-link flexible robot testbed. The robot arm is actuated by 3 servo motors and is movable in 3D space. The robot has two accelerometers and three encoders as the sensors. The arm is validated by two sets of experiments: frequency measurements at static positions, and motions along two trajectories.