Design of a kinematically redundant Schönflies-motion generator with auxiliary grasping task

This paper introduces a novel kinematically redundant five-degree-of-freedom (DOF) parallel mechanism (PM) which can be fully gravity balanced. The kinematic redundancy can be used to generate large rotational workspace or perform auxiliary grasping task. The grasping task is selected as an example to be investigated in this work. Firstly, description of structure and principle of gravity balancing are introduced. Secondly, closed-form inverse and forward kinematic models are presented in detail. Thirdly, an example trajectory that includes the auxiliary grasping task is demonstrated using a commercially available multi-body dynamic simulator. Analysis results show that the proposed PM has quite a few potential applications.