Strutting its stuff

In the sci-fi classic War of the Worlds, HG Wells conjured up tripods that could conquer the world. While his Martian war-machines are impractical as transport (highly impressive to look at, but too unstable), a similar solution could be about to make major inroads into the machine tool market.

Many engineering sectors, particularly the tool, die and aerospace industries, need high-precision machining, and all of them place a premium on speed. But there’s usually a trade-off between the two — the faster you work, the less precise you are.

Engineers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, have devised their own tripod in the form of a piece of mounting equipment, which could get around this problem.

The usual type of design for industrial robots which carry out machining tasks uses what is known as serial kinematics, where each moving assembly is placed on top of the next. This, according to the Fraunhofer team, seriously limits the way the machine can move — particularly how parts of it can accelerate and jerk. These limits can only be surpassed through highly sophisticated engineering at correspondingly high cost, said research director Steffen Nestmann.