Heli4: A Parallel Robot for Scara Motions with a Very Compact Traveling Plate and a Symmetrical Design

This paper introduces Heli4 a new 4 degree-of-freedom parallel robot. It is inspired by the Delta architecture, but was designed to overcome its limitations, using an articulated traveling plate. Unlike most articulated traveling plates, Heli4´s traveling plate is very compact. Among other positive aspects is its symmetrical design. This paper gives the geometrical models, and particularly the forward position relationship which can be obtained in a closed form. In a third part, a detailed study of the robot singularities is made by taking into account the not-so-classic internal singularities