Evaluation of the Kinematic Performance of a 3- R RS Parallel Mechanism

This paper proposes a set of novel indices for evaluating the kinematic performance of a 3- R RS (R and S denote revolute and spherical joint respectively, R denotes active joint.), parallel mechanism whose translational and rotational movements are strongly coupled. First, the indices are formulated using the decoupled overall Jacobian matrix, which is developed using coordinate transformation. Then, the influences of the homogeneous dimensionless parameters on these indices are investigated. In addition, the dimension synthesis of the 3- R RS parallel mechanism is carried out by minimizing the mean value of the kinematic performance indices and their standard deviation. The results demonstrate that the established approach facilitates good global kinematic performance of the parallel mechanism.