Descriptive Geometric Kinematic Analysis of Clavel's "Delta" Robot

Abstract

Certain high speed industrial assembly robots share a peculiar three legged parallel architecture wherein three “hips”, attached to a fixed upper base or “pelvis”, actuate “thighs” connected by “knees” to “shins”. Each shin is a parallelogramic four-bar linkage. “Ankles” are connected to a common end effector “foot” which executes spatial translatory motion. Inverse and direct kinematic analyses of such manipulators have simple geometric solutions reducable to intersection of line and sphere. Computation is carried out efficiently in a common fixed reference frame.