Design and simulation of Chinese massage robot based on parallel mechanism

According to the systematic method for topological structure synthesis of parallel mechanism, one parallel mechanism of two degree of freedom (2 - DOF) realizing 1 translation-1 rotation(1T-1R) is put forward with single-opened-chain (SOC) as a unit. The paper presents the structural analysis and position analysis of the parallel mechanism composed of two platforms mutually connected by two RPR and two RP serial kinematic chains, where R and P stand for revolute and prismatic kinematics pair respectively. The mechanism is composed of two active branched-chains (R (⊥P) //R) and two assisted branched-chains (P⊥R). The virtual prototype of this mechanism is created in ADAMS software, and the simulation curve that verifies the validity of theoretical analysis is given. The advantage of this parallel mechanism is that the real-time control of the mechanism is realized conveniently based on more simple kinematic analyses and fewer DOF. Thus, the Chinese massage robot based on the mechanism should be better application prospect.