Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP URL' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. Abstract: It has been a desire to unify the models for structural and parametric analyses and design in the field of robotic mechanisms.This requires a mathematical tool that enables analytical description, formulation and operation possible for both finite and instantaneous motions. This paper presents a method to investigate the algebraic structures of finite screws represented in a quasivector form and instantaneous screws represented in a vector form. By revisiting algebraic operations of screw compositions, this paper examines associativity and derivative properties of the screw triangle product of finite screws and produces a vigorous proof that a derivative of a screw triangle product can be expressed as a linear combination of instantaneous screws. It is proved that the entire set of finite screws forms an algebraic structure as Lie group under the screw triangle product and its time derivative at the initial pose forms the corresponding Lie algebra under the screw cross product, allowing the algebraic structures of finite screws in quasi-vector form and instantaneous screws in vector form to be revealed.

Mainly drawing on screw theory and linear algebra, this paper presents an approach to determining the bases of three unknown twist and wrench subspaces of lower mobility serial kinematic chains, an essential step for kinematic and dynamic modeling of both serial and parallel manipulators. By taking the reciprocal product of a wrench on a twist as a linear functional, the underlying relationships among their subspaces are reviewed by means of the dual space and dual basis. Given the basis of a twist subspace of permissions, the causes of nonuniqueness in the bases of the other three subspaces are discussed in some depth. Driven by needs from engineering design, criteria, and a procedure are proposed that enable pragmatic, consistent bases of these subspaces to be determined in a meaningful, visualizable, and effective manner. Three typical examples are given to illustrate the entire process. Then, formulas are presented for the bases of the twist/wrench subspaces of a number of commonly used serial kinematic chains, which can readily be employed for the formulation of the generalized Jacobian of a variety of lower mobility parallel manipulators.

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Unifying the models for topology design and kinematic analysis has long been a desire for the research of parallel kinematic machines (PKMs). This requires that analytical description, formulation and operation for both finite and instantaneous motions are performed by the same mathematical tool. Based upon finite and instantaneous screw theory, a unified and systematic approach for topology design and kinematic analysis of PKMs is proposed in this paper. Using the derivative mapping between finite and instantaneous screws built in the authors' previous work, the finite and instantaneous motions of PKMs are analytically described by the simple and non-redundant screws in quasi-vector and vector forms. And topological and parametric models of PKMs are algebraically formulated and related. These related topological and parametric models are ready to do type synthesis and kinematic analysis of PKMs under the unified framework of screw theory. In order to show the validity of the proposed approach, a kind of two-translational and three-rotational (2T3R) 5-axis PKMs is taken as example. Numerous new structures of the 2T3R PKMs are synthesized as the results of topology design, and their Jacobian matrix is obtained easily for parameter optimization and performance evaluation. Some of the synthesized PKMs have outstanding capabilities in terms of large workspaces and flexible orientations, and have great potential for industrial applications of machining and manufacture. Among them, METROM PKM is a typical example which has attracted a lot of attention from global companies and already been developed as commercial products. The approach is a general and unified approach that can be used in the innovative design of different kinds of PKMs.