Optimal design and kinematics analysis of 5-DOF hybrid serial-parallel manipulator

Abstract: In recent years, with the development of various types of intelligent robots, new agricultural robots have become frontier technology in the field of international agricultural machinery. And as the complexity and diversity of the agricultural production and operation, the characteristics of advancement and practicability are needed to add to the agricultural robots. In this paper, in order to increase the automation level of agricultural operations and improve the ability of adapting to different working environments, a novel kinematically redundant planar parallel mechanism (PM) with continuous rotational axis and fewer joints is proposed, which has one rotational degree of freedom (DOF) and 2 translational DOFs (2T1R). For the rotational DOF, the rotational axes of the moving platform are mutually parallel at any position of the whole workspace; for the translational DOFs, the directions are simple horizontal and vertical. This robot has a quite simple structure. As we all know, simple structures of the robot can reduce the manufacturing cost to a great extent. This kinematically redundant planar PM is a metamorphic mechanism. For instant, when the moving platform and the intermediate link are locked, the PM becomes an actuation redundant PM. So this PM can be used to research not only the kinematically redundant property but also the actuation redundant property. Actually, this new type PM can be used in the field of food packaging, seed selection, fruit classification, transport, picking, and so on. For the purpose of improving the robot properties, 15 5-DOF hybrid serial-parallel manipulators are constructed on the basis of this type of planar PM. One of these manipulators is selected to do some analysis in this paper, which is more likely to be applied in agriculture. Firstly, the kinematic model of the 5-DOF hybrid manipulator is established. Especially, the forward and inverse kinematics models show the briefness of this robot. What is worth mentioning is that a simple kinematics model is conducive to realize the control of the robot. And this matches the strategy of robot intelligence. The velocity Jacobian matrix is deduced, the singularity analysis of the PM is done according to the Jacobian matrix, and the conditions for reducing singularity are listed. The concept of singularity degree is defined, which can be used to keep away from mechanism singularity. Then based on the flexibility performance index, the optimal design of the 2T1R planar PM is investigated and the performance atlas is drawn. From the performance atlas, we can choose the physical dimensions of the PM. The 3-dimentional model based on a set of optimal physical dimensions is established. After that, in order to reduce weight without the loss of stiffness, the structural topology optimization is accomplished by means of the finite element software. The analysis and comparison of the whole structure are also carried out. This novel hybrid manipulator has the characteristics of simple structure, simple kinematic model, high stiffness, and high degree of modularity, which provides a very variety of application prospects in the field of agricultural machinery.