Introduction

This book represents Part 2 of a larger work on the structural synthesis of parallel robots. The originality of this work resides in combining new formulae for the structural parameters and the evolutionary morphology in a unified approach of structural synthesis giving interesting innovative solutions for parallel robots. Part 1 (Gogu 2008a) presented the methodology of structural synthesis and the systematisation of structural solutions of simple and complex limbs with two to six degrees of connectivity systematically generated by the structural synthesis approach. Part 2 of this work focuses on the structural solutions of

translational parallel robotic manipulators

(TPMs) with two and three degrees of mobility.

This section recalls the terminology, the new formulae for the main structural parameters of parallel robots (mobility, connectivity, redundancy and overconstraint) and the main features of the methodology of structural synthesis based on the evolutionary morphology presented in Part 1.