Design and Optimization of a 6-DOF Singularity-Free Parallel Manipulator

A novel six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) singularity-free parallel manipulator (PM) is presented. The PM consists of five peripheral limbs and a centre limb, which makes the mechanism have high stiffness and large tilting capability . Due to the special architecture, the doubly actuated centre limb of the manipulator could have infinite inverse solutions. In every configuration of the end-effector, the manipulator can adapt its centre limb to the position and orientation with best dexterities. Targeting for further analysis of the manipulator, its detailed kinematic analysis is developed, including the solutions of the inverse position problems, the singularity, the dexterity and the workspace. The analysis results show that the proposed manipulator has good performance and thus may be suitable candidate for complicated surface machining.