Optimum kinematic design of the attitude adjusting mechanism of a new shuttle conveyor

This paper is an attempt to propose and design kinematically an attitude adjusting mechanism of a new shuttle conveyor, which will be used in the automobile industry for the pretreatment and electro-coating (EC). A spatial mechanism composed of two identical planar PRRRP (F represents an active prismatic joint, and R represents a revolute joint) parallel kinematic mechaisms (PKMs) is proposed as the attitude adjusting mechanism, the structure of the mechanism is describled in detail and the inverse kinematics of this mechanism is derived. Based on the concept of transmission angle, local transmission index (LTI) is suggested to evaluate the motion/force transmissibility, and four related indices are introduced. The performance atlases of these indices are plotted, and the optimum design process based on these atlases is presented. The results of the paper are very useful to develop the shuttle conveyor.