Abstract
With the decrease of experienced engineers in recent years, studies have focused on developing systems that save skilled hand motions as electronic data for reproduction by robots. However, few studies have succeeded in reproducing skilled hand motions in three-dimensional work spaces. In addition, the reproducibility of a hand motion is not guaranteed when the initial distance between an object and the robot for the saved motion differs from the distance for the reproduced motion. In the present study, a delta parallel mechanism system with three degrees of freedom was developed that saves and reproduces skilled hand motions in three dimensional work spaces. An external sensor that measures the distance between the object and robot is attached to the mechanism and thus guarantees the reproducibility of hand motions against variations in the initial position. The validity of the proposed system was confirmed analytically and experimentally. In the experiment, writing motions by a hard pen were saved and reproduced; the proposed system demonstrated a performance superior to conventional systems.
