An Articulated Robotic Forceps Design with a Parallel Wrist-Gripper Mechanism and Parasitic Motion Compensation

In this paper, a novel 4 degrees-of-freedom articulated parallel forceps mechanism with a large orientation workspace (±/−90deg in pitch and yaw, 360deg in roll rotations) is presented for robotic minimally invasive surgery. The proposed 3RSR-1UUP parallel mechanism utilizes a UUP center-leg which can convert thrust motion of the 3RSR mechanism into gripping motion. This design eliminates the need for an additional gripper actuator, but also introduces the problem of unintentional gripper opening/closing due to parasitic motion of the 3RSR mechanism. Here, position kinematics of the proposed mechanism, including the workspace, is analyzed in detail, and a solution to the parasitic motion problem is provided. Human in the loop simulations with a haptic interface are also performed to confirm the feasibility of the proposed design.

Accuracy and precision: A new viewon kinematic assessment of solid-state hinges and compliant mechanisms

Compliant mechanisms are alternatives to conventional mechanisms which exploit elastic strain to produce desired deformations instead of using moveable parts. They are designed for a kinematic task (providing desired deformations) but do not possess a kinematics in the strict sense. This leads to difficulties while assessing the quality of a compliant mechanism’s design. The kinematics of a compliant mechanism can be seen as a fuzzy property. There is no unique kinematics, since every deformation need a particular force system to act; however, certain deformations are easier to obtain than others. A parallel can be made with measurement theory: the measured value of a quantity is not unique, but exists as statistic distribution of measures. A representative measure of this distribution can be chosen to evaluate how far the measures divert from a reference value. Based on this analogy, the concept of accuracy and precision of compliant systems are introduced and discussed in this paper. A quantitative determination of these qualities based on the eigenvalue analysis of the hinge’s stiffness is proposed. This new approach is capable of removing most of the ambiguities included in the state-of-the-art assessment criteria (usually based on the concepts of path deviation and parasitic motion).

Kineto-Static Analysis and Design Optimization of a 3-DOF Wrist Rehabilitation Parallel Robot with Consideration of the Effect of the Human Limb

When designing rehabilitation robots, there remains the challenge of ensuring the comfort and safety of users, especially for wearable rehabilitation robots that interact with human limbs. In this paper, we present a kineto-static analysis of the 3-RPS parallel wrist rehabilitation robot, taking into account the soft characteristics of the human limb and its kinematic mobility. First, the human upper-limb model was made to estimate the interaction force and moment through inverse kinematic analysis. Second, a static analysis was conducted to obtain the force and moment acting on the human limb, which is directly related to the user’s comfort and safety. Then, the design parameters of the 3-RPS robot were obtained by generic optimization through kineto-static analysis. Finally, the influence of the parasitic motion of the 3-RPS robot and the initial offset between the wrist center and the robot moving platform were discussed. Through the analysis results, we provide effective solutions to ensure the safety and comfort of the user.

Design and Analysis of a Compact Piezo-actuated Microgripper with a Large Amplification Ratio

Abstract This paper presents a piezo-actuated microgripper characterized by large amplification ratio and compact structure size. The microgripper is actuated by a piezo-stack actuator that is integrated with a two-stage displacement amplifier to achieve large travel range. A new design methodology “flexure hinge individualized design” (FHID) was proposed to realize large amplification ratio. According to this methodology, each flexure hinge was designed personally based on force condition of the piviot to reconfigure the motion stiffness of the compliant microgripper so that the parasitic motion and displacement loss could be eliminated. Consequently, a 52-amplification-ratio amplifier was obtained. The developed microgripper was modeled via kinematics and Castigliano's displacement theorem, respectively. Finite element analysis and the experimental studies were conducted to evaluate the characteristics of the microgripper. The results show that the motion stroke of the gripper-tip is 917 μm, and the structure dimension is 62 mm × 42 mm ×12 mm. The design methodology FHID is generic and can be extended to other compliant mechanisms.

On the Structural Constraint and Motion of 3-PRS Parallel Kinematic Machines

This paper presents a consistent analytic kinematic formulation of the 3-PRS parallel manipulator (PM) with a parasitic motion by embedding the velocity level structural constraint equation into the motion expression. Inverse rate kinematics (IRK) is solved with a simple constraint compatible velocity profile, which is obtained by projecting the instantaneous restriction space onto the motion space. Moreover, the systematic method to reveal the parasitic motion is introduced. Thus, the parasitic terms are automatically identified from the main motions. Unlike the usual approach, this study does not consider any explicit parasitic motion expression. Consequently, the derivation of constraint compatible input velocity, which comprises the parasitic term, is simplified. To incorporate the parasitic motion into the task velocity, constraint Jacobian of the manipulator is analytically obtained first. The manipulator Jacobian is extended to incorporate the passive joint’s information apart from the active joints and structural constraint. Hence, the dimension of the Jacobian matrix used to solve IRK is 9 × 6. The validity of the IRK is proved by the Bordered Gramian based forward rate kinematics (FRK). Then, an accurate numerical integration, RK4, is applied to the joint velocity of IRK to obtain the manipulator’s joint values. Consequently, the moving plate’s pose is obtained via forward position kinematics computed using integrated active and passive joint values for validation. The projection matrix used to get compatible constraint motion adjusts our input velocity and makes it compatible with the structural constraint policy, and the parasitic motion is embedded easily. Thus, an explicit formulation of the parasitic motion equation is not required, as the usual practice. Finally, the study presented numerical simulations to show the validity of the outlined resolutions. This paper’s result and analysis can be uniformly applied to other parallel manipulators with less than 6 DoFs.

High-Precision Guide Stiffness Analysis Method for Micromechanism Based on the Boundary Element Method

The guide stiffness performance directly affects the motion of the micromechanism in accuracy and security. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze the guide stiffness precisely. In this paper, a high-precision guide stiffness analysis method for the micromechanism by the boundary element method (BEM) is proposed. The validity and accuracy of the analysis method are tested by a guide stiffness experiment. In order to ensure the accuracy and safety during the micromechanism motion, a guiding unit of the micromechanism was designed based on the guiding principle. The guiding unit can provide parasitic motion and additional force in the motion of the micromechanism. Then, the stiffness equations of the beam element are derived by the boundary element method. The stiffness equation of straight circular flexure hinge is analyzed by rigid discretization and rigid combination, and the guide stiffness of the mechanism is investigated by rigid combination. Finally, according to the actual situation, the stiffness matrix of the guide rail (Kb) was proposed, and the analytical value of the guide stiffness was calculated to be 22.2 N/μm. The guide stiffness performance experiment was completed, and the experimental value is 22.3 N/μm. Therefore, the error between the analysis method and the experimental results is 0.45%. This study provides a new method for the stiffness analysis of high-precision micromechanisms and presents a reference for the design and stiffness analysis of complex structures. This method is helpful for stiffness analysis of the microrotary mechanism with high accuracy.

Optimization of 3-DoF Manipulators’ Parasitic Motion with the Instantaneous Restriction Space-Based Analytic Coupling Relation

This paper presents a velocity-level approach to optimizing the parasitic motion of 3-degrees of freedom (DoFs) parallel manipulators. To achieve this objective, we first systematically derive an analytical velocity-level parasitic motion equation as a primary step for the optimization. The paper utilizes an analytic structural constraint equation that describes the manipulator’s restriction space to formulate the parasitic motion equation via the task variable coupling relation. Then, the relevant geometric variables are identified from the analytic coupling equation. The Quasi-Newton method is used for the direction-specific minimization, i.e., optimizing either the x-axis or y-axis parasitic motion. The pattern-search algorithm is applied to optimize all parasitic terms from the workspace. The proposed approach equivalently describes the 3-PhRS, 3-PvRS, 3RPS manipulators. Moreover, other manipulators within a similar category can be equivalently expressed by the proposed method. Finally, the paper presents the resulting optimum configurations and numerical simulations to demonstrate the approach.