Prototype design of a translating parallel robot

The paper describes the mechanical design of a parallel manipulator for motions of pure translation, whose kinematic analysis has shown very good performances such as a large workspace and small overall dimensions of the mobile platform; in particular, the “Cartesian” structure of the machine allowed to obtain constant accuracy and kinematic properties throughout the workspace. The structural design has minimized the mass of the moving links and, by the combined use of FEM and multibody codes, allowed to take into consideration the high stresses coming from inertial forces and to evaluate a-priori the resulting dynamic properties. A physical prototype has just been built in order to validate the developed models and assess the actual robot performances in real operating conditions. The present research has been partially co-funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and University and by the Polytechnic University of Marche under PRIN03 project “Design and prototyping of application-oriented mini-PKM”.