“…Furthermore, many practical applications do not require the six degrees of freedom of a general Gough-Stewart platform, particularly five-degrees-of-freedom parallel manipulators had been proposed, among simple pointing devices, as multi-axis machine tools (Bohez, 2002;Zheng et al, 2005;Gao et al, 2005Gao et al, , 2006, bio-mechanical devices (Zhu et al, 2008;Gallardo-Alvarado, 2010) or new architectures for medical applications (Vlachos & Papadopoulos, 2005;Piccina, 2009). With these considerations in mind and with the motivation that not always is essential a pure parallel kinematic topology, this work is intended to be a viable option to the development of a new class of five-degrees-of-freedom robots with a nearly parallel kinematic architecture, preserving the advantages of serial-parallel manipulators but with the possibility to mount all the active limbs on the fixed platform.…”