Motion characteristics and rotational axis analysis of three DOF parallel robot mechanisms

Abstract

This paper presents a simple method based on the screw theory for determination of the possible motion characteristics and the position of rotational axes when the linear displacements are constrained for multi-degree of freedom (2-5 DOF) parallel mechanisms. The theory is significant for understanding novel constrained multi-DOF mechanisms, their kinematics and robot path planning. The paper also reports the analysis results for several three DOF platform and pyramid parallel mechanisms.