A THREE-LINK GRAVITY-BALANCED MECHANISM FOR OPERATING ROOM ASSISTANCE

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 gravitybalanced in all configurations. The presented mechanism in this study can also be extended to solve a multi-link gravity balance problem.