Abstract
Linear mechanisms have usually required some precisely finished guideways whose shapes are plane or cylinder. However, it is difficult to manufacture such guideways and to maintain their accuracy against wear. A linear mechanism developed in this paper consists of double Watt's links using spherical slide bearings. The spherical bearings can easily eliminate influences of misalignments and dimensional errors of the links on the accuracy. Moreover, the steel balls used as a guideway of rotational axis introduce high rotational accuracy and easy maintenance inexpensively. The main results obtained are as follows : (1) With the steel balls of sphericity 0.2 μm, the errors in the perpendicular directions of the motion were within 1 μm and changes of the pitch and yaw angles were within 1 second of arc, while the working length was 9 mm. However, moving path hysteresis was observed caused by friction in the contact parts. (2) The dimensional errors and the relative position errors of the links had little effect on the motion errors. (3) No link interactions were observed introduced by the angle errors and the misalignments of the rotational axes in the link mechanisms. (4) The wear of the balls and their supporting parts affects the moving accuracy.
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