Title: Radiation effect on the performance of robot manipulator

Authors: Shimeng Li; Hongfei Wang; Yuan F. Zheng; Lei (Raymond) Cao

Addresses: Circular Wave Drive Partners, Inc., 1330 Kinnear Road, Columbus, OH 43212, USA ' Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University, 2015 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH 43210, USA ' Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University, 2015 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH 43210, USA ' Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, The Ohio State University, 2015 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH 43210, USA

Abstract: Robots have great potential in substituting human beings for operations in accidents of nuclear power plants; however, knowing that the radiation will potentially damage the robot components, how the robot will perform in radiation environment has never been discussed. In this paper, we claim that the performance of robot manipulators will vary because servo motor will degrade due to the radiation. Degrading to the motor occurs because radiation damages the magnets residing inside the motor. Once damage is done, the degrading of the motor is permanent in a deterministic way, which is reflected in the reduced back electromotive force (back-emf). We first use MATLAB to simulate the performance of servo motor variation before and after radiation based on the model of radiation demagnetisation, and then build a three degree-of-freedom (DOF) manipulator to analyse the motion variation of a robot arm based on the results of motor performance variation.

Keywords: robot manipulator; servo motor; radiation damage.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMA.2017.093239

International Journal of Mechatronics and Automation, 2017 Vol.6 No.1, pp.10 - 19

Received: 23 Jun 2016
Accepted: 07 May 2017
Published online: 24 Jul 2018 *

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