Type synthesis of six-DOF wrist-partitioned fully parallel manipulators

A six-DOF wrist-partitioned fully parallel manipulator is a parallel manipulator in which three of the six actuated joints are used to control the position of a point on the moving platform while the other three are further used to control the orientation of the moving platform. Such parallel manipulators are in fact the parallel counterparts of the wrist-partitioned serial manipulators, which are widely used in industry. Unlike parallel manipulators of a general structure, a six-DOF wrist-partitioned fully parallel manipulator usually has simple kinematic characteristics such as its forward displacement analysis and singularity analysis are easy to solve. This paper deals with the type synthesis of six-DOF wrist-partitioned fully parallel manipulators. An approach is first proposed for the type synthesis of this class of parallel manipulators. Using the proposed approach, six-DOF wrist-partitioned fully parallel manipulators can be constructed from the types of three-DOF non-overconstrained spherical parallel manipulators. A large number of six-DOF wrist-partitioned fully parallel manipulators are then obtained, and several types of practical relevance are also identified. Copyright © 2007 by ASME.