Optimum Static Balancing of a Parallel Robot for Medical 3D-Ultrasound Imaging

Simon Lessard , Pascal Bigras , Ilian Bonev (1) , Sébastien Briot (2) , Vigen Arakelian (3)

1 GPA - Département de génie de la production automatisée
2 IRCCyN - Institut de Recherche en Communications et en Cybernétique de Nantes
3 DGMA - Département de Génie Mécanique et Automatique

Static balancing of mechanical systems is useful and required in many situations. The objective of such balancing is the compensation of gravitational forces in order to achieve a static equilibrium. A balanced system becomes safer and actuators are reduced in size. However, balancing a system requires numerous complex mechanical add-ons or unavoidable addition of mass. This is the reason why methods of partial static balancing have been developed and applied in practice. In this paper, a newly designed parallel robot for medical 3D-ultrasound imaging is required to be statically balanced without complicated design modifications. Simple mechanical add-on that is optimally designed can reduce substantially the effect of gravity. The efficiency of these suggested solutions is illustrated by numerical simulation of the robot.

Mots clés: static equilibrium; parallel robot; medical robot; root-mean-square minimization

Domaines: Génie mécanique [physics.class-ph]; Génie mécanique [physics.class-ph]

Simon Lessard, Pascal Bigras, Ilian Bonev, Sébastien Briot, Vigen Arakelian. Optimum Static Balancing of a Parallel Robot for Medical 3D-Ultrasound Imaging. 12th IFToMM World Congress, Jun 2007, Besançon, France. ⟨hal-00451939⟩