Design and Analysis of a New 5-DOF Hybrid Serial-Parallel Manipulator

In this paper, a 2R1T (two rotations and one translation) over-constrained parallel mechanism R(2RPR)R/SP with two ordered continuous rotational axes is proposed, which contains fewer joints, by concatenating a 2-degree-of-freedom (DOF) RR tilting head with orientation-adjusting capability, a novel 5-DOF hybrid manipulator is constructed. On this basis, optimize the sizes with the best performance of the motion/force transmissibility as the optimization target, and the design dimensions that meet the requirements of the workspace are obtained and the structural design is carried out. The static stiffness of the manipulator are analyzed, and the analysis results are verified by simulation and compared with the products that have been successfully applied in foreign countries. An iterative searching method is used to determine the workspace of the manipulator, and evaluate whether the workspace of the hybrid manipulator meets the requirements.