Pipe for water supply is one of the important parts that supply water to home, factory and so on. Water leakage in pipe for water supply due to deterioration, ground sinking and earthquake leads to enormous economical loss. Therefore, pipe for water supply should be designed to satisfy the requirement of, for instance, structural stability and fatigue durability. The purpose of this study was to investigate the fatigue durability of flexible joint for relaxing the impact due to earthquake and ground sinking. For this purpose, flexible joint was simulated using dynamic characteristics and fatigue life. As the results, the problem of fatigue durability may occur when flexible joint and pipe for water supply are treated as rigid body in simulation. Thus it means that the role of packing in flexible joint is very important and packing should be designed as optimal conditions that are considered fatigue durability as well as waterproof.

The pipe for water supply is essential part among SOC (Social Overhead Capital) fields. Pipe for water supply is mainly damaged by deterioration of pipe, earthquake, ground sinking and so on. The leakage of water have been led to enormous economical loss in our country. The purpose of this study was to investigate the structural stability of flexible joint for relaxing impact due to earthquake and ground sinking. For this purpose, flexible joint was simulated using tensile load and internal pressure. As the results, flexible joint for structural stability was needed the tensile load of below 3 ton and internal pressure of below 60 kgf/cm2. However, it is considered that real flexible joint should be applied more high safety factor than that of simulation result because of combined stress.

In this paper, an exact reshaping method for the motor dynamics of a flexible-joint robot is proposed using an integral manifold approach. Obtaining the exact model for both motor-side and linkside dynamics of a flexible-joint robot is difficult due to its under-actuated nature and complex dynamics. Despite the simple structure of the motor-side dynamics, they are difficult to model accurately for a flexible-joint robot due to motor disturbances, especially when speed reducers such as harmonic drives are installed. An integral manifold feedback control (IMFC) is proposed to reshape the motor dynamics. Based on the integral manifold approach, it is theoretically proved that the IMFC reshapes motor dynamics exactly even with bounded disturbances such as motor friction. The performance of the proposed IMFC is verified experimentally using a single degree-of-freedom flexible-joint robot under gravity conditions.

In this paper, an external torque estimation problem in one-degree-of-freedom (1-DOF) flexible-joint robot equipped with a joint-torque sensor is revisited. Since a sensor torque from the jointtorque sensor is distorted by two dynamics having a spring connection, i.e., motor dynamics and link dynamics of a flexible-joint robot, a model-based estimation, rather than a simple linear spring model, should be required to extract external torques accurately. In this paper, an external torque estimation algorithm for a 1-DOF flexible-joint robot is proposed. This algorithm estimates both an actuating motor torque from the motor dynamics and an external link torque from the link dynamics simultaneously by utilizing the flexible-joint robot model and the Kalman filter estimation based on random-walk model. The basic structure of the proposed algorithm is explained, and the performance is investigated through a custom-designed experimental testbed for a vertical situation under gravity.