Kinematics analysis of a 6-DOF selectively actuated parallel manipulator

Abstract

This paper presents the kinematics analysis of a novel parallel manipulator termed a selectively actuated parallel mechanism (SA-PM). The end-effector of the manipulator can produce 3-DOF spherical motion, 3-DOF translation, 3-DOF hybrid motion, or complete 6-DOF spatial motion depending on the types of the actuation (rotary or linear) chosen for the actuators. As the manipulator architecture decouples translation and rotation of the end-effector for individual control, the position and orientation of the end-effector are analyzed separately. The close-form solutions are provided, which shows that there are at most eight solutions for both inverse and forward kinematics.