The Design of a Novel Prismatic Drive for a Three-DOF Parallel-Kinematics Machine

The design of a novel prismatic drive is reported in this paper. This transmission is based on Slide-O-Cam, a cam mechanism with multiple rollers mounted on a common translating follower. The design of Slide-O-Cam was reported elsewhere. This drive thus provides pure-rolling motion, thereby reducing the friction of rack-and-pinions and linear drives. Such properties can be used to design new transmissions for parallel-kinematics machines. In this paper, this transmission is optimized to replace ball-screws in Orthoglide, a three-DOF parallel robot optimized for machining applications.