【正文】
prismatic actuators or revolute actuators. In the case of the robot with revolute actuators, the mechanism consists of five re volute pairs and the two joints fixed to the base are actuated, while in the case of the robot with prismatic actuators, the mechanism consists of three revolute pairs and two prismatic joints, in which the prismatic joints are usually actuated. The output of the robot is the translational motion of a point on the endeffector. This means the orientation of the end effector is also changed at any moment. Accordingly, some versions of the 2DOF translational parallel robot (TPR) have been disclosed. One of them has been applied in precise pick amp。 place operations at high speed at SFB in German, In 2001, another 2DOF TPR has been proposed for the conceptual design of a 5axis machine tool, The structure, kinematics and dynamics of the TPR were discussed in de tail, Recently, a 2DOF TPR with revolute actuators was introduced^. The TPR presented in Ref. [4] has been used in the design of a planer machine tool with a gantry structure instead of a traditional one with serial chains to improve its stiffness and inertia characteristics. However* all of these TPRs consist of at least of one parallelogram, which increases the difficulty of manufacturing and affects the accuracy.This paper introduces a novel planar translational parallel robot with simple kinematic structure. The robot can position an objective with constant orientation. Some kinematic problems, such as inverse and forward kinematics, workspace and singularity are discussed.1 Description of the 2DOF TPR and its topological architectures Architecture descriptionThe novel 2DOF translational parallel robot and its schematic are shown in Fig. 1. The endeffector of the robot is connected to the base by two kinematic legs 1 and 2. Leg 1 consists of three revolute joints and leg 2 two revolute joints and one cylinder joint, or three re volute joints and one prismatic joint In each leg, the re volute joints are parallel to each other. The axes of the revolute joints in leg 1 are normal to those of the joints in leg 2. The two joints attached to the endeffector are put in the adjacent sides of a square. The kinematic chain of the robot is denoted as RRRRRC (Ccylinder joint) or RRRRRRP, One may see that, if the P joint is fixed, the robot is actually the famous Sarrus mechanism.As introduced previously,other TPRs have at least one parallelogram in their structures. The TPR proposed here has no parallelogram. This makes the manufacturing easier. However, pared with the TPRs presented in Refs. [9,10],the TPR studied here has some disadvantages. For example, the performance of the new TPR is not symmetric in its workspace. Additionally, the new TPR is likely to need more occupying space.(a) the CAD model (b) the schematic The 2DOF translational parallel robot CapabilityHere, an expression like is used to describe the capability of an object j. In , and express the translation and rotation of the object, respectively. If an element in is equal to 0, there is no such a translation or rotation. If it is equal to 1, there is the capability. For example, means that the object has no translation along the xaxis。