Design of a Digital Type Six Dimensional Computer Input Device

Common mouse is popular used as computer input device at present. It can only give two kinds of motion signals, translations along x- and y- axes. For some other important or special application fields, six dimensional computer input device is necessary. This paper brings forward a novel type of this kind of device based on the parallel robot technology. It is composed of the manipulation head, the base, and six sub-chains. The special structure makes it possible for user to operate the manipulation head at random. It can translate along and rotate around all the three axes. One of the important problem is that how to tell apart the six kind of motions. In order to reach the low cost and high performance, limit switch is used for the motion judgement and the selection method is also described.