Performance analysis of a reconfigurable redundant parallel manipulator

This work discusses the kinetostatic performances of a new reconfigurable parallel-serial hybrid manipulator with redundant actuators carrying a serial wrist with 3 degrees of freedom (dof). The parallel part can be easily reconfigured with a simple disassembly and reassembly procedure to obtain different configurations that can be classified in the following groups: 3 dof, 4 dof and 3 dof with redundant actuation. The paper focuses on the kinematics of the parallel structure solving the direct and the inverse kinematics, analyzing the singularities and evaluating some kinetostatic performance indices.