Home robot arms require a payload of 2 kg to perform various household tasks; at the same time, they should be operated by low-capacity motors and low-cost speed reducers to ensure reasonable product cost. Furthermore, as robot arms on mobile platforms are battery-driven, their energy efficiency should be very high. To satisfy these requirements, we designed a lightweight counterbalance mechanism (CBM) based on a spring and a wire and developed a home robot arm with five degrees of freedom (DOF) based on this CBM. The CBM compensates for gravitational torques applied to the two pitch joints that are most affected by the robot’s weight. The developed counterbalance robot adopts a belt-pulley based parallelogram mechanism for 2-DOF gravity compensation. Experiments using this robot demonstrate that the CBM allows the robot to meet the above-mentioned requirements, even with low-capacity motors and speed reducers.

Static balance of an articulated robot arm at various configurations requires a torque compensating for the gravitational torque of each joint due to the robot mass. Such compensation torque can be provided by a spring-based counterbalance mechanism. However, simple installation of a counterbalance mechanism at each pitch joint does not work because the gravitational torque at each joint is dependent on other joints. In this paper, a 6 DOF industrial robot arm based on the parallelogram for multi-DOF counterbalancing is proposed to cope with this problem. Two passive counterbalance mechanisms are applied to pitch joints, which reduces the required torque at each joint by compensating the gravitational torque. The performance of this mechanism is evaluated experimentally.

A robot manipulator handling a heavy weight requires high-capacity motors and speed reducers, which increases the cost of a robot and the risk of injury when a human worker is in collaboration with a robot. To cope with this problem, we propose a collaborative manipulator equipped with a counterbalance mechanism which compensates mechanically for a gravitational torque due to the robot mass. The prototype of the manipulator was designed on the basis of a four-bar linkage structure which contains active and passive pitch joints. Experimental performance evaluation shows that the proposed robot works effectively as a collaborative robot.