<i>HANA</i>: a novel spatial parallel manipulator with one rotational and two translational degrees of freedom

Abstract

This paper concerns the proposal and analysis of HANA , a novel spatial parallel manipulator with over constraint. The parallel manipulator consists of a base plate, a movable platform, and three connecting legs. The moving platform has three degrees of freedom (DoFs), which are two degrees of translational freedom and one degree of rotational freedom, with respect to the base plate. The new parallel manipulator is very interesting for the reason of a lack of singularity in its workspace, single-DoF joint architecture and high rotational capability of its moving platform. The inverse and forward kinematics problems are described in closed-forms. The velocity equation of the new parallel manipulator is given. Three kinds of singularities are presented. The workspace for the manipulator is analyzed systematically. Especially, the index to evaluate the rotational capability of the manipulator is defined and discussed in detail. The proposed manipulator has a wide application in the fields of industrial robots, simulators, micro-motion manipulators, and parallel kinematics machines.