Design and Implementation of a High Speed Cable-Based Planar Parallel Manipulator

Robotic automation has been the major driving force in modern industrial developments. High speed pick-and-place operations find their place in many manufacturing applications. The goal of this project is to develop a class of high speed robots that has a planar workspace. The presented robots are intended for pick-and-place applications that have a relatively large workspace. In order to achieve this goal, the robots must be both stiff and light. The design strategies adapted in this study were expanded from the research work by Prof Khajepour and Dr. Behzadipour. The fundamental principles are to utilize a parallel mechanism to enhance robot stiffness and cable construction to reduce moving inertia. A required condition for using cable construction is the ability to hold all cables under tension. This can only be achieved under certain conditions. The design phase of the study includes a static analysis on the robot manipulator that ensures certain mechanical components are always held under tension. This idea is extended to address dynamic situations where the manipulator velocity and acceleration are bounded. Two concept robot configurations, 2D-Deltabot, and 2D-Betabot are presented. Through a series of analyses from the robot inverse kinematic model, the dynamic properties of a robot can be computed in an effective manner. It was determined that the presented robots can achieve 4g acceleration and 4m/s maximum speed within their 700mm by 100mm workspace with a pair of 890W rotary actuators controlling two degrees of freedom. The 2D-Deltabot was chosen for prototype development. A kinematics calibration algorithm was developed to enhance the robot accuracy. Experimental test results had shown that the 2D-Deltabot was capable of running at 81 cycles per minute on a 730mm long pick-and-place path. Further experiments showed that the robot had a position accuracy of 0. 62mm and a position repeatability of 0. 15mm, despite a few manufacturing errors from the prototype fabrication

The impact of the state of the troposphere on the response to stratospheric heating in a simplified GCM

Previous studies have made use of simplified general circulation models (sGCMs) to investigate the atmospheric response to various forcings. In particular, several studies have investigated the tropospheric response to changes in stratospheric temperature. This is potentially relevant for many climate forcings. Here the impact of changing the tropospheric climatology on the modeled response to perturbations in stratospheric temperature is investigated by the introduction of topography into the model and altering the tropospheric jet structure. The results highlight the need for very long integrations so as to determine accurately the magnitude of response. It is found that introducing topography into the model and thus removing the zonally symmetric nature of the model’s boundary conditions reduces the magnitude of response to stratospheric heating. However, this reduction is of comparable size to the variability in the magnitude of response between different ensemble members of the same 5000-day experiment. Investigations into the impact of varying tropospheric jet structure reveal a trend with lower-latitude/narrower jets having a much larger magnitude response to stratospheric heating than higher-latitude/wider jets. The jet structures that respond more strongly to stratospheric heating also exhibit longer time scale variability in their control run simulations, consistent with the idea that a feedback between the eddies and the mean flow is both responsible for the persistence of the control run variability and important in producing the tropospheric response to stratospheric temperature perturbations

Parallel Manipulator

I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Amir Khajepour for all the help and guidance on this project. I have worked for Dr. Khajepour since my coop days. He has such a genius mind and a unique way to approach a problem, and he is always supportive in my research. I would also like to thank my colleagues, Saeed Behzadipour for his insight in the theoretical development; Robert Dekker for his help in the mechanical and electrical design; and Hang Tran for her assistant in numerous problems that I have encountered during my study. With all of the mechanical fabrication required in the prototype, I cannot stress how grateful I am for the assistance and training on machining and general mechanical knowledge that were given to me by our technician, Robert Wagner and our student shop supervisor John Potzold. Thanks to them, I have become a better engineer who is capable of not only making an equatio