Inverse kinematic optimal design of 6-DOF parallel manipulators

To obtain the required articular velocities as lower as possible for the given kinematics of the moving platform, this paper focuses on this kind of articular velocities optimization of 6-DOF parallel manipulators. Based on the inverse kinematic analysis, the H∞ norm of the weighted Jacobian matrix was adopted as the per-formance index to minimize the articular velocities, and then the optimal design problem was formulated to find a manipulator geometry that minimized the global performance index with the constraints of the workspace and structural parameters limits. Since the optimal design problem is a constrained nonlinear optimization problem without explicit analytical expressions, the genetic algorithm was applied to numerically solve the problem. Sim-ulation results indicate that the articular velocities of the optimal manipulators can be the minimum while the ki-nematic requirements of the moving platform are satisfied.