Type Synthesis of 3-DOF PPR-Equivalent Parallel Manipulators Based on Screw Theory and the Concept of Virtual Chain

PPR-equivalent parallel manipulators (PMs) are a class of 3-DOF PMs with great application potential. They are indeed the parallel counterparts of the 3-DOF PPR serial robots, in which the moving platform can rotate arbitrarily about an axis undergoing a planar translation. This paper deals with the type synthesis of 3-DOF PPR-equivalent PMs. At first, virtual chains are introduced to represent the motion patterns of 3-DOF motions and relevant results from screw theory are recalled. A method is then proposed for the type synthesis of 3-DOF PPR-equivalent PMs. Using the proposed approach, the type synthesis of 3-DOF PPR-equivalent PMs is performed in three steps. In addition to all the 3-DOF PPR-equivalent parallel kinematic chains and 3-DOF PPR-equivalent PMs proposed in the literature, a number of new 3-DOF PPR-equivalent parallel kinematic chains and 3-DOF PPR-equivalent PMs are identified. It is also found that there are no PPR-equivalent PMs with identical type of legs. The type synthesis of PPR-equivalent PMs is well solved using the proposed approach. The characteristic of the proposed approach is that the type synthesis of PPR-equivalent parallel kinematic chains is reduced to the type synthesis of 3-DOF single-loop kinematic chains and thus easy to perform.