  The design of a novel prismatic drive is reported in this paper. This
transmission is based on Slide-O-Cam, a cam mechanism with multiple rollers
mounted on a common translating follower. The design of Slide-O-Cam was
reported elsewhere. This drive thus provides pure-rolling motion, thereby
reducing the friction of rack-and-pinions and linear drives. Such properties
can be used to design new transmissions for parallel-kinematics machines. In
this paper, this transmission is optimized to replace ball-screws in
Orthoglide, a three-DOF parallel robot optimized for machining applications.
