Evaluation of the Position Error of Four Non-Overconstrained Spherical Parallel Manipulators

Abstract

The 3-RRR spherical parallel manipulator is known to be highly overconstrained, which causes several problems of mounting the mechanism, but has the advantage of having high rigidity thus a good precision. Several works in the literature proposed non-overconstrained versions of this mechanism. However, very few works dealt with the problem of the consequence of modifying an overconstrained mechanism into a non-overconstrained one, mainly from an accuracy point of view. In this work, we present an analysis of the accuracy of four different non-overconstrained SPMs, i.e., 3-RSR, 3-RCC, 3-RRS, and 3-RUU. These four SPM are then evaluated in translational and rotational accuracy due to manufacturing errors. The error on the position and orientation of the end-effector, due to manufacturing errors, are computed in 100 different configurations within their workspace. These SPMs are then compared among each other and we showed that the 3-RRS has the best compromise between the translational and rotational accuracy.