Abstract: The dynamic dimensional synthesis of Delta robot widely used for high-speed pick-and-place operations is studied. On the basis of the inverse kinematic and rigid body dynamic formulation, a novel global dynamic performance index is proposed for minimizing the maximum driving torque of a single active joint. The proposed index can explicitly be expressed in terms of dimensional and inertial parameters as well as system configurations, allowing the singular configurations to be easily found. Various geometrical and performance constraints are taken into account in terms of workspace/machine volume ratio, lower and upper bounds of mapping characteristics in terms of velocity, accuracy and actuation rigidity between the joint space and the operation space. The effects of the performance constraints on the feasible domain of design variables and the performance index are investigated in depth via an example, enabling a set of optimized dimensional parameters to be obtained for achieving a good dynamic performance throughout the entire workspace.

Key words: Dimensional synthesis, Dynamic performance, Parallel robot