Collision-Free Workspace Design of the 5-Axis Gantry-Tau Parallel Kinematic Machine

This paper describes the workspace of the 5-axis variant of the Gantry-Tau parallel manipulator. The 5-axis movements are achieved by extending the 3-axis Gantry-Tau with two linear telescope link actuators. A new analytic inverse kinematic solution for the 5-axis machine and an analysis of the collision-free zones of the machine are presented. The results show that by careful design of the manipulated platform, a collision-free 5-axis workspace can be achieved. The achievable re-orientation of 30 degrees in the entire workspace is large for a parallel kinematic machine