Kinematic Analysis of a 5-DOF Positioner for Precision Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Abstract Additive manufacturing, as a viable industrial-production technology, requires multi-DOF positioning with high precision and repeatability for either the printer head, or the part being printed. In this paper we present a novel methodology to analyze the error propagation informing the design of a high-precision robotic 5-DOF positioner for applications in additive manufacturing. We designed our positioner through serial attachment of linear and rotational stages by comparing the precision of three different kinematic arrangements of stages. Within order to minimize positioning errors in Cartesian space, the kinematic sensitivity of the mechanisms end-effector relative to the maximum expected error of each joint was computed, and the kinematic configuration with smallest 6D positioning error at the end-effector was selected. The methodology employed in this paper for the error propagation analysis of serial kinematic chains has a great level of generality and can facilitate the design and optimization of a wide-class of multi-DOF positioners.