Optimum architecture design of platform manipulators

The kinetostatic accuracy of a manipulator depends not only on its configuration but also on its architecture. The focus of this paper is on the study of the relation between the aforementioned accuracy and the architecture of platform manipulators. It has been shown that some architectures can cause the associated Jacobian matrix to be either singular or very ill-conditioned in some regions of the workspace. These singular or ill-conditioned architectures can never be used in practice and hence, must be eliminated at the design stage. This is done using a design optimization approach. A design example is included to illustrate this approach.<>