Overall Motion Planning for Kinematically Redundant Parallel Manipulators

In this work, a new approach for motion planning of kinematically redundant parallel manipulators is proposed and compared with a method previously proposed by the authors called point-to-point motion planning (PPMP). Overall motion planning (OMP) consists of determining actuation schemes that optimize the manipulator's performance while considering the entire given trajectory of the end-effector at once. The results of OMP are compared with those of PPMP of a kinematically redundant manipulator. It is shown that the proposed OMP strategy can generate actuation schemes for given trajectories such that the manipulator avoids singular configurations better than the PPMP strategy. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4006523]