Wrench Capabilities of a Kinematically Redundant Planar Parallel Manipulator

SUMMARY This paper presents a methodology to obtain the wrench capabilities of a kinematically redundant planar parallel manipulator using a wrench polytope approach. A methodology proposed by others for non-redundant and actuation-redundant manipulators is adapted to a kinematically redundant manipulator. Four wrench capabilities are examined: a pure force analysis, the maximum force for a prescribed moment, the maximum reachable force, and the maximum moment with a prescribed force. The proposed methodology, which finds the exact explicit solution for three of the four wrench capabilities, does not use optimization and is very efficient.