New fully decoupled manipulator with three translational motion for pick and place applications

A new three degree of freedom 3-DOF manipulator with fully decoupled translational motion is proposed in this paper. The conceptual design of the proposed manipulator is based on the pantograph mechanism which provide the decoupling motion. Parallelogram mechanisms are added to the pantograph to obtain the fixed orientation of the end-effector in XYZ directions. The proposed manipulator not only has the same characteristics of parallel manipulators as high stiffness, high accuracy and small power consumption, but also has large workspace compared to its volume as serial manipulators. Thus, the advantages of both parallel and serial manipulators are offered in the proposed manipulator. Moreover, it possess unique characteristic over decoupled parallel manipulator counterparts in terms of workspace to size ratio. Besides, this manipulator moves with high speed as the Pantopteron manipulator and many-times faster than the other decoupled parallel manipulators based on the magnification factor of the pantograph mechanism. The mobility, kinematic analysis and workspace of the proposed manipulator are studied in details. The simulation results are carried out using ADAMS software to validate the feasibility of the conceptual design.