Motion/Force Transmissibility Based Performance Evaluation of a 6-DOF Parallel Robot With 2-DOF Active Joints

3-PP(Pa)S robot is a six degrees of freedom (DOFs) parallel mechanism with 2-DOF active planar joint. For the design and application of the 3-PP(Pa)S robot, it is essential to investigate the motion/force transmissibility of the robot. But previous studies of the motion/force transmissibility have mainly focused on the parallel robots with 1-DOF active joints and thus cannot be directly applied to the 3-PP(Pa)S robot. In this paper, input twist subspace, transmission wrench subspace and output twist subspace are investigated to build mathematical models of the twists and wrenches corresponding to the 2-DOF active planar joint. Afterwards, based on the previous established frame of the local transmission index, some extended performance evaluation indices are defined to describe the motion/force transmissibility of the 3-PP(Pa)S robot. On this basis, the singularity and motion/force transmissibility of this mechanism are investigated. The motion/force transmissibility evaluation method is meaningful and applicable for the 3-PP(Pa)S parallel robot with 2-DOF active joints and can be further applied to other mechanisms with multi-DOF active joints.