A Translational Three-Degrees-of-Freedom Parallel Mechanism With Partial Motion Decoupling and Analytic Direct Kinematics
This work addresses a specific problem in robotics for designing efficient parallel mechanisms, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing topological design theories.
The paper tackled the design of a 3-DOF translational parallel mechanism with analytic direct and inverse kinematics and partial motion decoupling, achieving these properties through topological analysis based on POC equations.
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.