Design and kinematic analysis of a modular hybrid parallel-serial manipulator

In this paper, we propose a novel design of a hybrid 6-DOF parallel-serial manipulator. It consists of a 3-DOF planar parallel platform (lower part) and a 3-DOF serial robot arm (upper part). Benefiting from the hybrid kinematic structure, the manipulator possesses compromised performance between the serial robot and the parallel one, e.g., larger reachable and dexterous workspace (comparing with a parallel robot), and higher rigidity and loading capacity (comparing with a serial robot). It order to rapidly deploy the system, the modularity design concept is employed in the system development. Based on the modular and symmetric design, the symbolic closed-form solutions for both forward and inverse displacement analysis are derived, which are great helps for the motion planning, computer simulation, and on-line control of the hybrid manipulator. Computation examples are provided to verify the proposed kinematic analysis algorithms.