Abstract—Robots are one of the most representative fields in mechatronics, this article presents the development process of a mechatronic system, taking into account 3 DOF parallel robots, pointing out the integration of the elements and show- ing the challenges needed to be faced for the interfaces be- tween the robot modules and the GUI (Graphical User Inter- face). The interface uses virtual reality to provide the user with an interactive 3D graphical representation of the parallel robot. Index Terms— kinematics, design, TRIGLIDE, 3 degrees of freedom. I. INTRODUCTION The integration of this disciplines leads to more competi- tive products, new technical solutions can be achieved from a mechatronic approach solutions like: new technical func- tions, increased flexibility, extension of the range of pa- rameters used for machine control, reduce size and manu- facturing costs due to physical integration. A mechatronic product is a very complex system with several components, technologies and function all interre- lated and interdependent. The technical synergy of a mecha- tronics system creates critical dependencies between in- volved engineering disciplines, these dependences are dem- onstrated in many ways, mechanical properties may for ex- ample be strongly linked to the control system characteristic that in turn are strongly linked to software properties and the vice versa. In the design process of the robot one important aspect that was kept in mind was the modularity of the final prod- uct, building a modular robot bring several advantages like reconfiguration, the possibility to improve just one of the module without interceding in the entire structure, the pos- sibility to use robot modules in building other robots or other structures. But beside this advantage a modular prod- uct brings new challenge in building interfaces between all the modules that are used for the robot. Parallel robots have a number of advantages over the tra- ditional serial robots due to their particular architecture [1]. There are several examples of parallel robots, especially in the fields of assembly and medical applications. The paper is organized as follows. The conceptual de- signs of the medical robots system are proposed in Section II. The kinematics and analysis is carried out in Section III, where the reachable workspace of the robots is generated. Section IV is focused on the virtual reality model of the ro- bot architectures using the Virtual Reality toolbox from MATLAB/Simulink. In the four part are presented the results obtained and presented some graphs of the components of the TRIGLIDE parallel robot. The design of the 3 DOF parallel robots is presented in Section V. Finally, this paper concludes with a discussion of future research considerations in Section VI. II. KINEMATICS ANALYSIS FOR TRIGLIDE PARALLEL ROBOT Robot kinematics deals with the study of the robot motion as constrained by the geometry of the links. Typically, the study of the robot kinematics is divided into two parts, in- verse kinematics and forward (or direct) kinematics. A. Mathematical model To analyze the kinematic model of the parallel robots, two relative coordinate frames are assigned, as shown in Fig. 3. Fig. 3. Schematic diagram of TRIGLIDE parallel robot. A static Cartesian coordinate frame XYZ is fixed at the center of the base, while a mobile Cartesian coordinate frame X P Y P Z P is assigned to the center of the mobile plat- form. Ai, i = 1, 2, 3, and Bi, i = 1, 2, 3, are: the joints lo- cated at the center of the base, as presented in Fig. 4 & 5, Verdes Dan 1 , Sergiu-Dan Stan 2 , Member, IEEE, Milos Manic 3 , Member, IEEE, Radu Balan 4 1,2,4 Dept. of Mechatronics, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 3 Department of Computer Science, University of Idaho, USA Mechatronic design, kinematics analysis of a 3 DOF medical parallel robot 978-1-4244-5953-7/10/$26.00 ｩ2010 IEEE 101