Design of a Three-Axis Isotropic Parallel Manipulator for Machining Applications: The Orthoglide

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Orthoglide, a three-axis parallel manipulator designed for precise machining, emphasizing its uniform performance, regular workspace shape, and compact design, with a prototype demonstration.

Contribution

It presents the design and analysis of the Orthoglide, a novel 3-DOF parallel mechanism optimized for machining with uniform performance and a regular workspace shape.

Findings

Orthoglide achieves uniform kinetostatic performance in all directions.

The workspace of the Orthoglide is regular and well-defined.

A prototype of the Orthoglide has been developed and is discussed.

Abstract

The orthoglide is a 3-DOF parallel mechanism designed at IRCCyN for machining applications. It features three fixed parallel linear joints which are mounted orthogonally and a mobile platform which moves in the Cartesian x-y-z space with fixed orientation. The orthoglide has been designed as function of a prescribed Cartesian workspace with prescribed kinetostatic performances. The interesting features of the orthoglide are a regular Cartesian workspace shape, uniform performances in all directions and good compactness. A small-scale prototype of the orthoglide under development is presented at the end of this paper.