A Survey on Parallel Robots with Delta-like Architecture

In the early 1980s, Reymond Clavel invented the Delta robot at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. The initial objective was the development of an industrial robot dedicated to high-speed handling tasks of very light objects. Nowadays, the Delta robot is one of the best-known and most widely spread parallel robots. Besides various different designs of the original architecture, e.g. Delta robots with rotary and/or linear actuation, current industrial versions employ additional serial mechanisms in order to obtain rotational degrees of freedom. This paper gives an overview about the different variants of translational three degrees of freedom Delta-like robots and serial-parallel hybrid as well as fully-parallel Delta-like robots with rotational degrees of freedom.