Workspace and Accuracy Analysis on a Novel 6-UCU Bone-attached Parallel Manipulator

Abstract With the increasingly more extensive application of the medical surgical robot in the clinic, higher requirements have been put forward for medical robots. The bone-attached robot, a popular orthopedic robot in recent years, has a tendency of miniaturization and refinement. Thus, a bone-attached parallel manipulator (PM) based on 6-UCU (universal-cylindrical-universal) configuration is proposed, which is characterized by small volume, compact structure, high precision and six-dimensional force feedback. To optimize the structure and make it more compact, the workspace of the 6-UCU PM is analyzed based on the analysis of three kinds of constraint, and workspace model is established through spherical coordinate search method. This study also analyzes the influence of structural parameters on workspace, which may contribute to improving the efficiency of design and ensuring small-sized robots possess relatively large workspace. Moreover, to improve the motion accuracy, an error modeling method is developed based on the structure of 6-UCU PMs. According to this established error model, the output pose error curves are drawn using MATLAB software when the structure parameters change, and the influence of the structure and pose parameters change on the output pose error of PMs is analyzed. The proposed research provides the instruction to design and analysis of small PMs such as bone-attached robots.