Kinematic Analysis and Design of Kinematically Redundant Parallel Mechanisms

Abstract

This paper addresses the singularity analysis and the design of three new types of kinematically redundant parallel mechanisms, i.e., the four-degree-of-freedom planar and spherical parallel mechanisms and the seven-degree-of-freedom spatial Stewart platform. The main idea in the design of these parallel manipulators is the addition of one redundant degree of freedom in one of the kinematic chains of the nonredundant manipulator. Such manipulators can be used to avoid the singularities inside the workspace of nonredundant manipulators. After describing the geometry of the manipulators, the velocity equations are derived and the expressions for the Jacobian matrices are obtained. Then, the singularity conditions are discussed. Finally, the expressions of the singularity loci of the kinematically redundant mechanisms are obtained and the singularity loci of the nonredundant and redundant manipulators are compared. It is shown here that the conditions for the singularity of the redundant manipulators are reduced drastically relative to the nonredundant ones. As a result, the proposed kinematically redundant parallel manipulators may be of great interest in several applications.