Analysis of the kinematic characteristics of a high-speed parallel robot with Schönflies motion: Mobility, kinematics, and singularity

Abstract

This study introduces a high-speed parallel robot with Schönflies motion. This robot exhibits a promising prospect in realizing high-speed pick-and-place manipulation for packaging production lines. The robot has four identical limbs and a single platform. Its compact structure and single-platform concept provides this robot with good dynamic response potential. A line graph method based on Grassmann line geometry is used to investigate the mobility characteristics of the proposed robot. A generalized Blanding rule is also introduced into this procedure to realize mutual conversion between the line graphs for motions and constraints. Subsequently, the inverse kinematics is derived, and the singularity issue of the robot is investigated using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Input and output transmission singularity indices are defined based on the reciprocal product in screw theory and the virtual coefficient by considering motion/force transmission performance. Thereafter, the singular loci of the proposed robot with specific geometric parameters are derived. The mobility analysis, inverse kinematics modeling, and singularity analysis conducted in this study are helpful in developing the robot.

Keywords

parallel robot / mobility / inverse kinematics / singularity / transmission performance

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 51305222 and 51425501, and by the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program under Grant No. 2014z22068. The first author also wishes to acknowledge the support from the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Foundation.

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2016 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg