Characteristics and mechanism analysis of parallel link manipulator

In this paper the characteristics of the parallel link manipulator are discussed in comparison with a conventional serial link manipulator in terms of kinematics and statics. The parallel mechanism is analyzed by using a singular value decomposition of the transposed Jacobian for static case. In this analysis a performance index is introduced that indicates how the mechanism produces force and moment at its end. A suboptimal mechanism is proposed that has a better performance index than the conventional Stewart platform that was originally proposed as a parallel link mechanism.