This paper presents the explicit mapping relations between topological structure and position and orientation characteristic (POC) of mechanism motion output. It deals with (1) the symbolic representation and the invariant property of the topological structure of the mechanism, (2) the matrix representation of POC of mechanism motion output, and (3) the POC equations of serial and parallel mechanisms and the corresponding symbolic operation rules. The symbolic operation involves simple mathematic tools and fewer operation rules and has clear geometrical meaning, so it is easy to use. The POC equations cannot only be used for structural analysis of the mechanism (such as determining POC of the relative motion between any two links of a mechanism and the rank of single-loop kinematic chain and calculating the full-cycle DOF of a mechanism, etc.) but can be used for structural synthesis of the mechanism as well (e.g., structural synthesis of the rank-degenerated serial mechanism, the over constrained single-loop mechanism, and the rank-degenerated parallel mechanism, etc.).

A systematic theory for topology synthesis of parallel manipulators considering basic requirements such as kinematics, dynamics, control, and actuation is built. The kernel part of the theory is its proper application of a new mobility formula, output character equation of parallel manipulators, and units for single-opened-chains that have topological features. A feasible methodology for synthesizing parallel manipulators is also given, by which a detailed application is focused on the synthesis of three-dimension-translation parallel manipulators. The result synthesized encompasses not only most known mechanisms, but also some novel mechanisms with fine performances, such as simple forward/inverse kinematics and decoupling of input-output parameters that especially benefit control of theses structures.

The kinematics decoupling for parallel manipulators is studied in this paper. Based on the topological structure characteristics of parallel mechanisms, the internal relationship between kinematics decoupling and basic kinematics chains is revealed, and the basic principle for structural synthesis of topologically decoupled mechanisms is put forward. Using this theory, a group of 3 degree-of-freedom (DOF) partially decoupled manipulators are synthesized. The expected kinematic outputs of these manipulators are 1-DOF translation and 2-DOF rotation, and motions along or about undesired directions do not exist. The kinematics analysis of a newly synthesized manipulator is discussed and the results indicate that the decoupling property of these architectures makes possible reaching real time control and path planning of parallel manipulators.

Based on the position and orientation characteristic (POC) set and the POC equations for serial mechanisms and parallel mechanisms proposed by authors, this paper presents a novel general degree of freedom (DOF) formula which is totally different from approaches based on the screw theory and the displacement group. It can be used to determine the full-cycle DOF of parallel mechanisms (PMs) and multiloop spatial mechanisms using symbolic “union” and “intersection” operations for POC sets. These operations involve only several rules and only simple mathematical tools (vector algebra, theory of sets, etc.) are used. Furthermore, criteria for determination of the inactive joints and selection of the actuating joints are proposed. The presented approach is illustrated with several examples.

According to the topological design theory and method of parallel mechanism (PM) based on position and orientation characteristic (POC) equations, this paper studied a 3-DOF translational PM that has three advantages, i.e., (i) it consists of three fixed actuated prismatic joints, (ii) the PM has analytic solutions to the direct and inverse kinematic problems, and (iii) the PM is of partial motion decoupling property. Firstly, the main topological characteristics, such as the POC, degree of freedom and coupling degree were calculated for kinematic modeling. Thanks to these properties, the direct and inverse kinematic problems can be readily solved. Further, the conditions of the singular configurations of the PM were analyzed which corresponds to its partial motion decoupling property. 0 J J J