Design and kinematic analysis of modular reconfigurable parallel robots

Abstract

A modular parallel robotic system consists of a collection of individual standard units that can be assembled into various robot configurations for a diversity of task requirements. This paper is focused on the design and kinematic analysis of modular reconfigurable parallel robots. A set of fundamental modules is considered. A local frame representation of the product-of-exponentials (POE) formula, i.e., the local POE formula, is employed for the kinematic analysis of modular parallel robots. Two forward displacement analysis algorithms and a workspace visualization scheme are presented for a class of 3-leg modular parallel robots. Computation examples are also given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. The kinematic formulation shows that the local POE formula is a systematic and well-structured method for the kinematic analysis of parallel robots.