This paper presents a sensitivity analysis of the Orthoglide, a 3-DOFtranslational Parallel Kinematic Machine. Two complementary methods aredeveloped to analyze its sensitivity to its dimensional and angular variations.First, a linkage kinematic analysis method is used to have a rough idea of theinfluence of the dimensional variations on the location of the end-effector.Besides, this method shows that variations in the design parameters of the sametype from one leg to the other have the same influence on the end-effector.However, this method does not take into account the variations in theparallelograms. Thus, a differential vector method is used to study theinfluence of the dimensional and angular variations in the parts of themanipulator on the position and orientation of the end-effector, andparticularly the influence of the variations in the parallelograms. It turnsout that the kinematic isotropic configuration of the manipulator is the leastsensitive one to its dimensional and angular variations. On the contrary, theclosest configurations to its kinematic singular configurations are the mostsensitive ones to geometrical variations.
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