• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.180-185
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• 2004

Unlike industrial manipulators, the manipulators mounted on the service robots are interacting with humans in various aspects. Therefore, safety has been the important design issue. Many compliant robot arm designs have been introduced for safety. It is known that passive compliance method has faster response and higher reliability than active ones. In this paper, a new safe mechanism based on passive compliance has been proposed. Passive mechanical elements, specifically transmission angle of the 4-bar linkage, springs and shock absorbing modules are incorporated into this safe mechanism. This mechanism works only when the robot arm exerts contact force much more than the human pain tolerance. Validity of the safe mechanism is verified by simulations and experiments. In this research, it is shown that the manipulator using this mechanism provides higher performance and safety than those using other passive compliance mechanisms.

• Journal of Korean Society of Coastal and Ocean Engineers
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.139-148
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• 2000

In this paper, the interaction of oblique incident waves with a bottom-mounted and fluid-filled flexible membrane structure is investigated in the frame of linear hydro-elastic theory. The static shape of a membrane structure containing the fluid of a specific density is initially unknown and must be calculated before the hydrodynamic analysis. To solve hydrodynamic problem, the fluid domain is divided into the inner and outer region. The inner solution based on discrete membrane dynamic model and simple-source distribution over the entire fluid boundaries is matched to the outer solution ba~ed on an eigenfunction expansion method. The numerical results were compared to a series of Ohyama's experimental results. The measured reflection and tran¬smission coefficients reasonably follow the trend of predicted values. Using the computer program developed, the performance of a bottom-mounted and fluid-filled flexible membrane strocture is tested with various system parameters (membrane shape, internal pressure, density ratio) and wave characteristics (wave frequencies, incident wave angle). It is found that a bottom-mounted and fluid-filled flexible membrane structure can be an effel;tive wave barrier if properly designed.