Design and Experimental Study of a 3-DOF Parallel Swivel Head

Abstract:

Traditional parallel mechanisms (PMs) are usually characterized by small tilting capability. To overcome this problem, a 3-DOF parallel swivel head (PSH) with large tilting capacity is proposed in this paper. The proposed PSH, which is structurally developed from a conventional 3-PRS parallel mechanism (PM), can achieve a large tilting capability by means of structural improvements. Firstly, a modified spherical joint with a maximum tilting angle of ±120o is devised to diminish the physical restrictions on the orientation workspace. Secondly, a UPS typed leg is introduced for the sake of singularity elimination. The superiority of the proposed PSH is theoretically proved by investigations of singularity-free orientation workspace and then is experimentally validated using a prototype fabricated. The theoretical and experimental results illustrate that the proposed PSH has a large tilting capacity and thus can be used as swivel head for a hybrid machine tool which is designed to be capable of realizing both horizontal and vertical machining.

• Periodical: Applied Mechanics and Materials (Volume 418)
• Pages: 132-140
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMM.418.132
• Online since: September 2013
• Authors: Dan Wang, Jiang Zhen Guo, Rui Fan, Wu Yi Chen
• Keywords: Hybrid Machine Tool, Kinematic Redundancy, Parallel Robot, Singularity-Free Workspace

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