Workspace Generation of Planar Wire-Actuated Parallel Manipulators with Antipodal Method

This article presents an analytical solution to workspace generation of planar wire-actuated parallel manipulators based on the planar antipodal theorem from multi-fingered grasping. Using the geometry of the wires, equations describing the borders of the workspace are formulated. The external force is modeled as a wire, and the workspace of manipulators with more than four wires is obtained by the union of the workspace contributions of each set of four wires. The workspaces of a manipulator, with and without external force, are generated with this method.