PARA-Arm: A five-bar parallel manipulator with singularity-perturbed design

We propose a new singularity-perturbed design approach to a planar five-bar parallel-link manipulator. The design allows us to operate the manipulator either in parallel or in serial branch mode, and also to exchange those modes. Thus, it is possible to merge some of the well-known advantages of serial and parallel manipulators. We study two basic singularity-perturbed designs and show that one of them is preferable. A feasibility study through computer simulation, including maximum torque requirement, is also presented.

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