Design of a New Haptic Device using a Parallel Mechanism with a Gimbal Mechanism

This paper proposes a new haptic device using a parallel mechanism with gimbal type actuators. This device has three legs actuated by 2-DOF gimbal mechanisms, which make the device simple and light by fixing all the actuators to the base. Three extra sensors are placed at passive joints to obtain a unique solution of the forward kinematics problem. The proposed haptic device is developed for an operator to use it on a desktop in due consideration of the size of an average Korean. The proposed haptic device has a small workspace for on operator to use it on a desktop and more sensitivity than a serial type haptic device. Therefore, the motors of the proposed haptic device are fixed at the base plate so that the proposed haptic device has a better dynamic bandwidth due to a low moving inertia. With this conceptual design, optimization of the design parameters is carried out. The objective function is defined by the fuzzy minimum of the global design indices, global force/moment isotropy index, global force/moment payload index, and workspace. Each global index is calculated by a SVD (singular value decomposition) of the force and moment parts of the jacobian matrix. Division of the jacobian matrix assures a consistency of the units in the matrix. Due to the nonlinearity of this objective function, Genetic algorithms are adopted for a global optimization.