Dimensional synthesis of a 3-DOF translational parallel manipulator considering kinematic dexterity property

This paper presents a method for dimensional synthesis of a three degree-of-freedom three-prismatic-universal-universal (3-PUU) translational parallel manipulator (TPM) considering the kinematic dexterity property at the same time. A mixed comprehensive dexterity index (CDI) making a compromise between the condition number of Jacobian matrix and the manipulability within a desired cylindrical workspace is introduced. The architecture parameters of the 3-PUU TPM are optimized by employing sequential quadratic programming (SQP) algorithm subject to a set of appropriate constraints. The comparison between the optimized architecture and initial architecture illustrates that the comprehensive dexterity performance of the structure with optimized parameters is better than the initial structure without optimization.