Functional design of a manipulator for the automation of laboratory precision tasks

The paper outlines the functional design of a novel robotized work-cell for biomedical applications that aims at substituting human operators in high precision repetitive tasks. Paramedical staff, in fact, must spend much time and attention at prearranging many daily doses of medicines in every hospital facility: the use of an automatic device for such operations relieves the work of staff and improves the traceability and safety of many clinical processes. This paper describes the functional design of a robot dedicated to the manipulation of medicines and to the loading/unloading of an automatic processing station. The challenging requirements of the duty cycle suggested turning the design towards parallel kinematics machines to exploit their excellent dynamic performance within their workspace, despite the possibility of incurring in singular configurations. This paper describes the design walk-through for the kinematic optimization of the manipulator serving the workcell.