Analysis and design of a six-DOF parallel manipulator, modeling, singular configurations, and workspace

In this paper, a new architecture of a parallel robot with six degrees of freedom is presented. This device is well adapted to perform force feedback control, and under some conditions, can be fitted with a center of compliance. This robot has been designed in order to obtain a symmetric and compact structure. The particular properties of its geometric and kinematic models with respect to that of a classical parallel robot are addressed. Due to the fact that each actuator keeps a constant orientation with respect to the static part, we show that the direct model has a single analytical solution. This result leads us to characterize the robot singularities and the reachable workspace. To demonstrate the capability of the proposed structure, an application of the C5 parallel robot acting as a force controlled active wrist in an assembly task is described. Furthermore, the hardware and software control system is presented.