Manipulability-Based Design and Analysis of a Hybrid Manipulator for Highway Applications

This paper presents the design of a parallel/serial manipulator targeted for highway applications. As such, design simplicity is essential. The hybrid manipulator consists of a planar 2-link parallel mechanism coupled to a translational mechanism. Detailed kinematics are employed to understand the resultant workspace, feasible paths, and manipulability. Based on the analysis, optimal design parameters are selected using a manipulability-based approach to allow for dexterous operations over a full highway lane width. A simple but effective redundancy resolution method is developed to partition motion between the two mechanisms. The design method is applied for a representative highway maintenance task.