Error Analysis of a 3-DOF Parallel Mechanism for Milling Applications

Abstract

Parallel mechanisms have been investigated during the last two decades, due to the fact that they present some advantages in a comparison with serial structures. This work deals with the error analysis of a 3-dof asymmetric parallel mechanism, purposely conceived for milling applications. In a comparison with the previous proposed concepts, this type of kinematic structure demonstrates a promising behavior. Topologically, the architecture is simpler and lighter than Tricept because it has no central passive limb. In addition, only the constraining 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 the mappings of the tool positioning error throughout the available workspace, due to the actuators imprecisions and manufacturing tolerances, are discussed in detail.