Weeding manipulator exploiting its oscillatory motion for force generation: Verification of the effectiveness by simulations using Open Dynamics Engine

This paper addresses a weeding manipulator exploiting its oscillatory motion to generate a large force efficiently. To justify the exploitation, some simulations were conducted based on a manipulator model and a weed model created using open dynamics engine (ODE), which is a high performance library for simulating rigid body dynamics. The simulation results illustrated that the exploitation of an oscillatory motion is effective on force generation by a manipulator. Furthermore, it was shown that a manipulator drive method using Van der Pol (VDP) oscillator has better performance than a method using a sinusoidal wave function, because of an entrainment property of the VDP oscillator.