A Novel Straight-line Mechanism and Its Application in Robot Design

Abstract

Robots with straight-line output have many advantages over others, especially in case of precision-grasping and dealing with small or thick objects, the straight-line mechanism is the key element to achieve aimed functions for most of this kind of robots. This paper proposes a novel straight line mechanism and details its application in robot design. The proposed mechanism consists of three bars with linear input and straight-line output motion. This mechanism has a simpler structure than most other existing straight-line mechanisms. The geometric proof of its working principle is given. Besides, simulations are conducted to explore other possible straight line mechanisms based on the proposed mechanism and a general method to generate straight-line mechanism is proposed. Furthermore, the motion properties of the linear output as well as how the parameters of the bars influence the shape of the guides were analyzed. The results of the analysis indicate the proposed mechanism has relatively stable output speed. Straight-line mechanisms are commonly used in the industrial sector, taking the design of robot hand as an example, the author discusses the potential for the mechanism to be applied in robot design. The hand was designed based on the proposed straight-line mechanism, it can perform linear-parallel grasping to meet application requirements. The proposed mechanism can have much potential in future research.