Abstract:

Parallel mechanisms have been studied during the last two decades, due to the fact that they present some potential advantages in a comparison with serial structures. This work presents the kinematic analysis of a novel 3-dof asymmetric parallel mechanism, purposely conceived for milling applications. In a comparison with the previous proposed concepts, this type of kinematic structure shows some advantages. The architecture is simpler and lighter than Tricept because it has no central passive limb. In addition, only the central active limb needs to satisfy the parallelism and orthogonality conditions. Furthermore, one degree of freedom, associated to the third actuator, is decoupled from the other two. Important issues, related to this type of kinematic structure, such as position and velocity analysis, singularity occurrence prediction and workspace evaluation, are discussed in detail.