  This paper presents a sensitivity analysis of the Orthoglide, a 3-DOF
translational Parallel Kinematic Machine. Two complementary methods are
developed to analyze its sensitivity to its dimensional and angular variations.
First, a linkage kinematic analysis method is used to have a rough idea of the
influence of the dimensional variations on the location of the end-effector.
Besides, this method shows that variations in the design parameters of the same
type from one leg to the other have the same influence on the end-effector.
However, this method does not take into account the variations in the
parallelograms. Thus, a differential vector method is used to study the
influence of the dimensional and angular variations in the parts of the
manipulator on the position and orientation of the end-effector, and
particularly the influence of the variations in the parallelograms. It turns
out that the kinematic isotropic configuration of the manipulator is the least
sensitive one to its dimensional and angular variations. On the contrary, the
closest configurations to its kinematic singular configurations are the most
sensitive ones to geometrical variations.
