A novel planar parallel manipulator with high orientation capability for a hybrid machine tool: kinematics, dimensional synthesis and performance evaluation

In order to potentially realize the advantages of planar parallel manipulators to be used for hybrid machine tools, the inherently abundant singularities which diminish the usable workspace must be eliminated. Proper structure synthesis and dimensional synthesis can provide a good solution. So, a non-conventional architecture of a three-PPR planar parallel manipulator is proposed in this paper for a hybrid machine tool. The proposed architecture permits a large dexterous workspace with unlimited orientation capability and no singularities. It also provides partially decoupled motion which permits independent actuators control. The kinematic, singularity, orientation capability and workspace analyses of the proposed manipulator are studied to verify those advantages. Based on a non-dimensional design parameter space, the highly important indices for this application namely the workspace index (WI), the motion/force transmission index, the kinematic and dynamic dexterity indices and the stiffness index are selected to be maximized yielding proper dimensions of the design parameters. Those performance indices are proven to be uniform over all the workspace achieving highly important characteristics of uniform accuracy, acceleration characteristics, rigidity and force transmissibility. Performance evaluation is finally presented to verify the high performance of the proposed non-singular planar parallel manipulator with high orientation capability.