Structural Synthesis of Parallel Manipulators Based on a Different Approach

Abstract

This work tries to address structural synthesis procedures of parallel manipulators in a different point of view. In generic methodology while structural synthesis starts from deciding the structure of the platforms and computing the structure of the legs in terms of specified constraints, proposed procedure follows an inverse analogy. After the determination of desired number of legs and subspace constraints of the whole manipulator, possible configurations of platform structures are extracted and checked for their constructability. Throughout the study proposed procedure was introduced in detail along with the constraint equations. Utilizing introduced procedure for given examples, structural groups of parallel manipulators were created with respect to the desired constraints and actuators were attached for mobility considerations. All of the results were tabulated throughout the study in order to form various kinds of parallel manipulators as parallel platform manipulators, serial platform manipulators, and serial-parallel platform manipulators.