Module-based method for design and analysis of reconfigurable parallel robots

Abstract

This paper presents a method for the design and analysis of reconfigurable parallel robots. The inherent modularity in a parallel robot lends itself as a natural candidate for reconfiguration. By taking the branches as building blocks, many modular parallel robots can be constructed, from which a reconfigurable parallel robot can be realized. Among three types of reconfigurations, namely, geometry morphing, topology morphing, and group morphing, the method presented here is for the last two reconfigurations, thereby advancing the current research that is mainly limited to geometry morphing. It is shown that the module-based method not only provides a systematic way of designing a reconfigurable parallel robot, but also offers a unified modeling for robot analysis. Two examples are provided, one showing the topology morphing and the other showing the group morphing.

Keywords

reconfigurable parallel robot / topology morphing / group morphing

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61075099).

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg