Conceptual Design and Dimensional Synthesis of a Reconfigurable Hybrid Robot

Abstract

This paper deals with the conceptual design of a novel four-degree-of-freedom (dof) modularized robot which is composed of a 2-dof parallel mechanism plus a 2-dof rotating head attached to the moving platform. Patented with the name Bicept, the robot is the two-dimensional version of the Tricept robot and is designed as a reconfigurable module that can readily be integrated with 1-dof feed mechanism or a fixed base in order to form a set of reconfigurable robots with parallel-serial architecture. The dimensional synthesis of the 2-dof parallel mechanism as a component of the Bicept robot is also carried out by solving a one-dimensional nonlinear equation associated with the strut-length constraint. The dimensional parameters corresponding to various width-height ratios of the work space are obtained via examples.