Industrial demand for high precision manipulators has lead to heavy, stiff, and therefore, expensive, inefficient, and potentially dangerous serial arm manipulators. The move towards lighter, and therefore, flexible manipulators has not matured, although there have been advancements in data processing capabilities, sensor technology, and control theory in the past couple of decades that could potentially reduce the problems with flexible serial manipulators. Most research in the past has focused on single link manipulators and planar robot arms and less research has been done on spatial multi-link robots. This work presents the derivation for a low-order model for spatial multi-link serial arms. Due to its low number of degrees of freedom this model can be used in real-time systems for control and estimation. The model is then verified by comparing its performance to results from commercial finite element software. Additional tests are performed against a flexible robot arm testbed.

工业对高精度机械手的需求导致了笨重、僵硬、昂贵、低效和潜在危险的串行臂机械手。尽管在过去的几十年中，数据处理能力、传感器技术和控制理论取得了进步，可能会减少柔性串行机械手的问题，但向更轻、因此灵活的机械手的发展还没有成熟。过去的大部分研究都集中在单连杆机械手和平面机器人手臂上，而对空间多连杆机器人的研究较少。这项工作提出了空间多链路串行臂低阶模型的推导。由于其自由度数较低，该模型可用于实时系统进行控制和估计。然后通过将其性能与商业有限元软件的结果进行比较来验证该模型。额外的测试是针对灵活的机械臂测试台进行的。