Design, Manufacturing, Kinematic Analysis of a Kind of a 3-DOF Translational Parallel Manipulator

Parallel manipulators are mechanisms with closed kinematic chains which have been developed in different forms, but these manipulators have several drawbacks such as small workspace, existence of singular points in their workspace, and complex kinematics and dynamics equations that lead to increase of difficulty in their control. In spite of this, this mechanism has been being conventionally used in many different industrial applications such as machining, motion simulators, medical robots, etc. To overcome these drawbacks, design and manufacturing of a manipulator with three translational degrees of freedom are provided. Design of this manipulator was based on the possibility of three translational motions for its end-effector. The manipulator degrees of freedom are obtained via screw theory. Basic features, consisting of forward and inverse kinematics, workspace and singularity analyzes and also velocity analysis, are considered in this paper. A numerical algorithm is implemented to determine the workspace regarding applied joint limitations and the design parameters were extracted based on to achieving to the desired workspace. The robot motion is created by using of pneumatic actuators which receive their command from a pneumatic servo valve. After design steps, the required elements were provided and assembled in a robotic lab. Finally, the simulation results have transparently approved the improved robots.