Copyright © 2011 J. Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The increased demand for large-size forgings has led to developments and innovations of heavy-duty forging manipulators. Besides the huge carrying capacity, some robot features such as force perception, delicacy and flexibility, forging manipulators should also possess. The aim of the work is to develop a heavy-duty forging manipulator with robot features by means of combination of methods in mechanical, hydraulic, and control field. In this paper, through kinematic analysis of a novel forging manipulator, control strategy of the manipulator is proposed considering the function and motion of forging manipulators. Hybrid pressure/position control of hydraulic actuators in forging manipulator is realized. The feasibility of the control method has been verified by the experiments on a real prototype of the novel hydraulic forging manipulator in our institute. The intelligent control of the forging manipulator is performed with programmable logic controller which is suitable for industrial applications.