A parallel robotic attachment and its remote manipulation

This paper discusses a 3-dof (degree of freedom) parallel robotic attachment and its remote manipulation. This attachment is designed as a tripod that provides two rotary motions and one linear motion. The attachment can be mounted onto a variety of machines for different applications, including CNC milling machines, industrial robots, and CMM. Java technologies are used to develop a remote manipulation system for the parallel robotic attachment, including remote monitoring and control. The main difference of this system from the existing web-based or internet-based remote systems is the way to control the motion of the machine from a remote site. Instead of using a camera for monitoring, the tripod is modeled using 3D computer graphics with behavioral control nodes embedded. Compared with camera-based solutions, network traffic is largely reduced, thereby making real-time remote device manipulation practical on the web. Our parallel robotic attachment is one type of parallel kinematic mechanisms (PKM). With PKM emerging as a new way of building flexible systems or agile machines, its advantage over serial mechanism is also presented.