Workspace and rotational capability analysis of a spatial 3-DoF parallel manipulator

The analysis on the workspace and rotational capability of HANA, a spatial 3-DoF parallel manipulator, is concerned. 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 translations and one rotation, with respect to the base plate. The new parallel manipulator is very interesting for the reason of no singularity in the workspace, the single-DoF joint architecture and high rotational capability of the moving platform. The inverse kinematics problem is described in a closed-form, which is very useful to present the workspace geometrically. The constant-orientation and reachable workspaces for the manipulator are analyzed firstly. The index that is used to evaluate the rotational capability of the manipulator is defined and discussed in detail. Finally, the distribution of rotational capability index on the workspace is presented, which helps us know how much the index is at different point. The parallel manipulator has wide application in the fields of industrial robots, simulators, micro-motion manipulators, and parallel kinematics machines.