Modeling Flexibility Effects in Robotic Arms Via the Modified 4x4 D-H Homogeneous Transformation

This paper presents a method for the kinematical modeling of robot manipulator arms with flexible members. Development of such techniques are important for the improvement of robotic arms precision performance and their mechanical design. The approach employs the (4X4) Denavit-Hartenberg homogeneous transformations to describe the kinematics of light weight flexible manipulator arms. The method is further applied to a two-link planar robot manipulator and a set of numerical results is generated. Comparison between the theoretical results on the two-link planar robot manipulator is quite satisfactory.