Schönflies Motion PARAllel Robot (SPARA): A Kinematically Redundant Parallel Robot With Unlimited Rotation Capabilities

This paper presents a kinematically redundant parallel mechanism capable of generating the Schönflies motion with unlimited rotation capabilities. The kinematic modeling is presented and the analysis of the Jacobian matrices provides a basis for the singularity analysis of the manipulator. It is shown that the mechanism has unlimited rotation capabilities in a large translational workspace. The design of a prototype and experimental results are also presented.