STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS OF A CLASS OF 2-DOF AND 3-DOF PLANAR PARALLEL ROBOTS WITH IDENTICAL LIMB STRUCTURES

Abstract

Nowadays, with the development of mechanical engineering technologies in general and automation in particular, there is an increasing demand for finding various types and combination of mechanisms in machine design. This paper presents an analytical framework to analyze the relation between the mobility, the number of close loops of planar mechanisms and the structure e.g. the number of links and joints - of each close loop. A set of equations determining the structure of kinematic chains consisting of only links with Link-Value equals 2 or m is established based on the given degree of freedom (DOF) of the chains. The authors went further to synthesize structural variants of 2-DoF, 3-DoF planar parallel robot mechanisms with Identical Limb Structures by substitution and replacement position of full lower kinematic pairs from the original kinematic chains.