Kinematic Synthesis of a Spatial 3-RPS Parallel Manipulator

This paper presents the design of spatial 3-RPS parallel manipulators from dimensional synthesis point of view. Since a spatial 3-RPS manipulator has only 3 degrees of freedom, its end effector cannot be positioned arbitrarily in space. It is shown that at most six positions and orientations of the moving platform can be prescribed at will and, given six prescribed positions, there are at most ten RPS chains that can be used to construct up to 120 manipulators. Further, solution methods for fewer than six prescribed positions are also described.