  The orthoglide is a 3-DOF parallel mechanism designed at IRCCyN for machining
applications. It features three fixed parallel linear joints which are mounted
orthogonally and a mobile platform which moves in the Cartesian x-y-z space
with fixed orientation. The orthoglide has been designed as function of a
prescribed Cartesian workspace with prescribed kinetostatic performances. The
interesting features of the orthoglide are a regular Cartesian workspace shape,
uniform performances in all directions and good compactness. A small-scale
prototype of the orthoglide under development is presented at the end of this
paper.
