Structure synthesis of 6-DOF forging manipulators

A forging manipulator principally consists of the main motion mechanism and the yawing mechanism. In this paper, the two core parts are synthesized separately to construct the configurations of forging manipulators. First, the structures and combinations of basic mechanisms are determined, based on which a computer-aided method is proposed to synthesize planar 3-DOF main motion mechanisms. A rule based algorithm is developed to detect structural isomorphism among the main motion mechanisms. Then, the yawing mechanisms satisfying required design constraints are generated on the basis of screw theory. Finally, the configurations of 6-DOF forging manipulators are enumerated by integrating the selected main motion mechanisms with the yawing mechanisms. As a result, altogether 10 valid 6-DOF forging manipulators are acquired, among which five manipulators are novel mechanisms.