Robotic manipulators are desired to keep their settling time as low as possible for the pick-and-place industry. If the settling time is lower, more cycles can be made, increasing productivity. For high-speed parallel manipulators, a significant vibration cause that increases the
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Robotic manipulators are desired to keep their settling time as low as possible for the pick-and-place industry. If the settling time is lower, more cycles can be made, increasing productivity. For high-speed parallel manipulators, a significant vibration cause that increases the settling time is the movable mass and inertia. By dynamic balancing a manipulator, these vibrations can be eliminated. However, balancing a structure relies on adding mass and inertia to movable links, which decreases controllability. This thesis presents 2-DoF inherently dynamically balanced structures that make use of a constant inertia mechanism. Inherently balanced relies on structures that balance themself and do not need active counter-balancing, which is hard to control. A prototype of a 2-DoF, inherently dynamically balanced parallel manipulator is designed and optimized for controllability. By experimental verification, a reduction of 93.6% and 88.9% in shaking force and shaking moment, respectively, compared to the unbalanced case, is obtained for the first DoF and a 97.2% and 93.4% reduction, respectively, for the second DoF. The manipulator had a measured lowest eigenfrequency of 91 Hz and a workspace of about 20 cm. Up to 8 G of tip acceleration was achieved. So fully inherently dynamic balancing can be combined with high accelerations.