Innovative Drive Concept for Machining Robots

In this paper an innovative drive concept for robots to improve their machining capability is presented. As a test bed a two-axis robot is designed and equipped with torque motors with load-sided high resolution encoders in addition to conventional gear motors with harmonic drive gearboxes. The gear motors are used for positioning tasks while the torque motors in particular compensate static and dynamic load-sided angle errors. The model-based control algorithm is decoupled and separately actuates both the servo gear and torque motors. It is shown that a considerable increase of performance is possible when adding the torque motors especially regarding the compensation of dynamic angle errors. The paper will present the design and details of the new drive concept, the modeling basics and first simulation results.