A Three-link Gravity-balanced Mechanism for Operating Room Assistance

Abstract

The compensation of gravity is not a new problem and gravity-balanced mechanisms have been extensively studied. Some of these studies present practical applications of the gravity-balanced mechanisms, while others focus on the theoretical modelling of the mechanism. In this study, a practical application, a gravity-balanced planar robotic manipulator for operating room assistance is presented. In this design, an auxiliary parallelogram with two linear springs is utilized to accomplish gravity compensation. As a passive gravity-balanced mechanism, it does not have any actuators. The novelty of the mechanism is the exchangeable end-effector and changeable spring attachment location accordingly. The simulation results show that the designed mechanism is gravity-balanced in all configurations. The presented mechanism in this study can also be extended to solve a multi-link gravity balance problem.