DEMOCRAT: a design methodology for the conception of robot with parallel architecture

This paper presents a design methodology for parallel robots having to satisfy a set of performance constraints. After a reduction of the number of the design parameters some performance requirements are used to compute a closed region in the parameter space (in which a point define a unique robot geometry) which contains all the robot geometries satisfying the requirements. The requirements which have not been used in the first step are described then, in a high level language procedure which takes the robot geometry as input, determine if the robot fulfil the users requirements. The closed region determined at the first step is then discretized and the robot geometry which corresponds to each node of the discretisation is submitted to the procedure. The node leading to the robot(s) fulfilling at best the constraints is the design solution