Vibration Suppression Mechanism for Foldable Robot Arm for Drones

Flexure mechanism in a robotic system can improve the accuracy to perform work and reduce the damage that may have encountered due to the sudden motion. In this paper a flexure mechanism is proposed for the end-effector of a foldable robot arm for a drone, designed and operated for a solar panel cleaning task. The proposed flexure mechanism provides decoupled motions along the two rotational axes (θ
X
and θ
Y
) and high stiffness about one rotational axis (θ
Z
). The stiffness axis of the flexure mechanism is aligned about the cleaning motor torque axis such that the maximum torque can be transmitted to perform the task and undesirable motion about the other axes can be minimized. The simulation was conducted to determine the stiffness of the different axis using FE package. The performance of the foldable robot arm for a drone operated on a solar panel cleaning task has been tested to demonstrate the vibration suppression by the flexure mechanism.