Architecture Singularity Analysis of 4-U■S/U■U 5-DOF Parallel Mechanism

Architecture singularity of a parallel mechanism with five degrees of freedom (DOF) is analyzed. Such mechanism consists of a movable platform connected to the base by five active limbs. Four of them are identical 6-DOF limbs and the last one has the same DOF as the specified DOF of the movable platform. Based on the kinematics analysis, two categories of architecture singularities for such mechanism are proposed. Then the sufficient condition for each singularity is researched. Results show that the mechanism is singular when it employs each category of the proposed architecture, provided that it satisfies the corresponding sufficient condition. It can be concluded that the proposed two categories of architecture singularities should be avoided with the following dimensional synthesis of such mechanism.