Mechanical design of a vehicle robot for indoor renovation

• Main Author: Kang, Tuo.
• Other Authors: Xie Ming
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/50443
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This report describes the mechanical design of a vehicle robot which would be used for performing indoor renovation work. More specifically, its main function is to break old slabs on the wall into pieces with an ultra-sound breaker and at the same time using vacuum cleaner to suck all the pieces away. Since an environment full of ultra-sound is extremely harmful to human’s health, it is desirable to use robots to conduct this kind of labor intensive work. In order to achieve this goal, this vehicle robot is designed to be remotely controlled by human operators with a high-definition monitor screen showing all the necessary information within the room such that correct operations can be taken to command the robot to do its job. Because of the special design objective, the robot must be capable of reaching a maximum height of 3.6 m and have sufficient degrees of freedom to direct its working head to any locations within a room unit, on top of that, the robot must also look compact when it is at rest and be easy to transport. This bring s us to the biggest challenge of this project as it is very difficult to achieve both design compactness and the ability of reaching at least 3.6 m high at the same time. However, after carefully analyzing the mechanism of some marine equipment like loading arm and studying the structure of some commercially available robots, the author eventually managed to come up with a design that not only overcomes these dimensional constraints but also improves on the efficiency. The design stages include the conceptual design, embodiment design and finally the detailed design. The complete design as well as all the individual components is modeled in Solid-Works and detailed technical drawings required for the fabrication are also created. Beside this, all the relevant analysis and calculation are also done as verification of the mechanical design and to safeguard the whole process going within a reason range.