Abstract
In the past decades, parallel mechanisms (PMs) have attracted a lot of attention from the academic and industrial communities. Compared with the more commonly used serial manipulators, the parallel one has attractive advantages in accuracy, rigidity, capacity, and load-to-weight ratio.
In recent years, the research and application have evolved from general six-DOF PMs to lower-mobility PMs. The essential reason is that lower-mobility PMs have similar applications to general six-DOF PMs, while they are much simpler in structure and cheaper in cost. The research of lower-mobility PMs has become new hot point. A great deal of research on lower-mobility PM has been carried out all over the world, and a large number of new mechanisms, such as Delta, Tricept, medical robots, and microrobots, have been built for various applications.
This book opens a window to view the current research and development situation on lower-mobility PMs contributed by international researchers. The book consists of seven papers introducing both basic research and advanced developments. Covered topics include kinematics, dynamic analysis, optimization design, modeling, simulation, and control, and the development of some new special applications. The new algorithms and methods presented in the contributions are very effective for solving general problems in design and analysis of parallel robots.
Finally, I would like to express our deep acknowledgments to all of the authors for their contributions to this book.