A New Planar 3-DOF Parallel Mechanism With Continuous 360-Degree Rotational Capability

Abstract

This paper presents a novel 3-DOF planar parallel mechanism with 360-degree rotational capability, which can be used as a positioning device. A high rotational capability is necessary to reduce process time and to apply the mechanism to various fields such as micro machining and PCB depaneling. The proposed mechanism has the advantage of a continuous rotational capability over existing planar parallel mechanisms with limited rotation. The position and velocity kinematics are derived, and the singularities are analyzed based on the Jacobian matrices. The workspace can be determined not to have a singularity inside, and the kinematic variables for enlarging the singularity-free workspace are determined.

Workspace and performance analysis of a 6-DOF hexapod-type manipulator with a circular guide

“…Other papers also evaluated the performance of mechanisms with a circular guide using the conditioning index, for example, Ref. 40 analyzed a 3-DOF spherical manipulator; Refs; 41 and 42 studied 3-DOF planar manipulators; Refs; 9 and 10 considered 6-DOF spatial manipulators. The above papers that considered manipulators with mixed translational and rotational DOFs, however, did not normalize the matrices they used; therefore, the obtained results can be misleading, and we cannot use them for accurate comparison with our manipulator with a circular guide.…”