Program Suite for Conceptual Designing of Parallel Mechanism-Based Robots and Machine Tools

In the development of robots and machine tools, in addition to conventional and serial structures, parallel mechanism-based kinematic structures have been used over a longer period of time. Aside from a number of advantages, the irregular shape and relatively small dimensions of the workspace formed by parallel mechanisms rank among the major weaknesses of their application. Accordingly, this fact has to be taken into consideration in the process of designing parallel mechanism-based robots or machine tools. This paper describes the categorization of criteria for the conceptual design of parallel mechanism-based robots or machine tools, resulting from workspace analysis as well as the procedure of their defining. Furthermore, it also presents the designing methodology that was implemented into the program for the creation of a robot or machine tool space model and the optimization of the resulting solution. For verification of the criteria and the programme suite, three common (conceptually different) mechanisms with a similar mechanical structure and kinematic characteristics were used