Advances in Mechanical Engineering (Jul 2021)
Force sensitivity analysis and scale design of Stewart parallel manipulator
Abstract
There are many indices for evaluating the operational performance of parallel robots, but most of them start from kinematics and rarely pay special attention to the force transmission process. After studying the relationship and characteristics of the forward and reverse force transmission of the Stewart parallel manipulator under quasi-static conditions, three new indices are proposed in this paper, which are forward force sensitivity, reverse force sensitivity, and overall force sensitivity. Subsequently, the influences of six parameters on the overall force sensitivity index are analyzed. Furthermore, this paper propose three new structural optimization design schemes based on the three newly proposed indices. Finally, it is verified experimentally that the unit reverse force sensitivity of a single joint is consistent with the theory and the error between the theoretical and experimental values is obtained.