Delta Robot

A high-speed sorting robot with three parallel arms pulling a small platform, nicknamed the “spider hand.”

The Delta robot is a parallel robot, meaning several kinematic chains connect to the end effector at once, unlike the link-after-link serial structure of a typical robot arm, invented in the 1980s by Reymond Clavel's team at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. It has three arms hanging from a base at the top, each connected through a parallelogram linkage to a small platform below, constraining the platform to translate but not rotate, often with an added rotary axis. All the motors sit on the fixed base, so the moving parts are very light, giving it extremely high speed and accurate positioning, at the cost of a small payload and limited workspace. It was originally developed for packing chocolates at high speed, and is now widely used for high-speed sorting of food, electronic components, and pharmaceuticals, a typical device for pick-and-place tasks.

ExampleA “spider hand” hanging upside down above a food-factory line uses vision to spot cookies on the conveyor and picks several into packaging boxes each second.

Also called

Parallel Robot, Spider Robot

Related

Parallel Mechanism · Pick-and-Place · Sorting · Industrial Robot · Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm · Serial Mechanism

Sources

Delta robot - Wikipedia
Reymond Clavel - Wikipedia