Manipulability of a planar wire driven haptic device

This paper presents a planar 4 wire driven 3-DOF mechanism. For a planar haptic interface, this device could provide planar forces and moment feedback to the human operator. The particular end-effector geometric configuration overcomes manipulability problems arising from other recent planar wire haptic interfaces [R.L. Williams II, Int. J. Virtual Reality 3 (3) (1998) 13]. Moreover, an explicit forward kinematic pose solution is obtained by introducing a modified wire configuration. Complete kinematic and manipulability analyses are presented.