Manxin Wang

Force/Motion Transmissibility Analysis of Six Degree of Freedom Parallel Mechanisms

Drawing mainly on the concepts of dual space and dual basis in linear algebra and on existing screw theory, this paper presents a novel and systematic approach for the force/motion transmissibility analysis of 6DOF parallel mechanisms. By taking the reciprocal product of a wrench on a twist as a linear functional, the property exhibited by the dual basis allows the formulation of the force/motion transmissibility between the joint space and operation space in an accurate and concise manner. The consistency between the force/motion transmissibility and the minimum singular value of the Jacobian for singularity identification is rigorously proved. This leads to the development of a set of homogeneously dimensionless local and global transmission indices for measuring the closeness to singular configurations as well as for kinematic performance evaluation over a given workspace. A Stewart platform is employed an exemplar to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.

An Approach to Determining the Unknown Twist/Wrench Subspaces of Lower Mobility Serial Kinematic Chains

Mainly drawing on screw theory and linear algebra, this paper presents an approach to determining the bases of three unknown twist and wrench subspaces of lower mobility serial kinematic chains, an essential step for kinematic and dynamic modeling of both serial and parallel manipulators. By taking the reciprocal product of a wrench on a twist as a linear functional, the underlying relationships among their subspaces are reviewed by means of the dual space and dual basis. Given the basis of a twist subspace of permissions, the causes of nonuniqueness in the bases of the other three subspaces are discussed in some depth. Driven by needs from engineering design, criteria, and a procedure are proposed that enable pragmatic, consistent bases of these subspaces to be determined in a meaningful, visualizable, and effective manner. Three typical examples are given to illustrate the entire process. Then, formulas are presented for the bases of the twist/wrench subspaces of a number of commonly used serial kinematic chains, which can readily be employed for the formulation of the generalized Jacobian of a variety of lower mobility parallel manipulators.

Compliance Analysis of a 3-DOF Spindle Head by Considering Gravitational Effects

The compliance modeling is one of the most significant issues in the stage of preliminary design for parallel kinematic machine(PKM). The gravity ignored in traditional compliance analysis has a significant effect on pose accuracy of tool center point(TCP) when a PKM is horizontally placed. By taking gravity into account, this paper presents a semi-analytical approach for compliance analysis of a 3-DOF spindle head named the A3 head. The architecture behind the A3 head is a 3-RPS parallel mechanism having one translational and two rotational movement capabilities, which can be employed to form the main body of a 5-DOF hybrid kinematic machine especially designed for high-speed machining of large aircraft components. The force analysis is carried out by considering both the externally applied wrench imposed upon the platform as well as gravity of all moving components. Then, the deflection analysis is investigated to establish the relationship between the deflection twist and compliances of all joints and links using semi-analytical method. The merits of this approach lie in that platform deflection twist throughout the entire task workspace can be evaluated in a very efficient manner. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by the FEA and experiment at different configurations and the results show that the discrepancy of the compliances is less than 0.04 μm/N−1 and that of the deformations is less than 10μm. The computational and experimental results show that the deflection twist induced by gravity forces of the moving components has significant bearings on pose accuracy of the platform, providing an informative guidance for the improvement of the current design. The proposed approach can be easily applied to the compliance analysis of PKM by considering gravitational effects and to evaluate the deformation caused by gravity throughout the entire workspace.

A Dual Space Approach for Force/Motion Transmissibility Analysis of Lower Mobility Parallel Manipulators

By drawing on the duality of twist space and wrench space, this paper presents a general and systematic approach for force/motion transmissibility analysis of lower mobility nonredundant and nonoverconstrained parallel manipulators. This leads to the formulation of a complete and justifiable model that enables the force/motion transmissibility analysis to be integrated into a unified framework under the umbrella of a homogenous and decoupled linear transformation that maps the coordinates of the platform wrench/twist in the joint space to its natural coordinates in the operation space. Utilizing the penalty method to avoid the indeterminate form “0/0” when the local maximum of a virtual coefficient approaches zero, a set of dimensionally homogeneous transmission indices is proposed which can be employed for precisely representing the closeness to different types of singularities defined in twist space as well as for dimensional optimization. An example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach.

An Approach for the Lightweight Design of a 3-SPR Parallel Mechanism

A hierarchical approach for the lightweight design of a 3-SPR parallel mechanism (PM) is presented in this paper. The criterion to match the rigidities of the limb body and those of the joints is proposed; meanwhile, the constraints in terms of technological processes and the dimensional correlations among components and joints, etc., are considered in this approach. Based on these considerations, the design flow is developed by maximizing the lower-order natural frequencies as well as by minimizing the weights of the limbs/subassemblies subject to specified rigidity constraints attributed to them. The proposed approach simultaneously enables the PM to achieve both high static rigidities and high dynamic behaviors.