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.

This paper is organized in two parts. In Part I, the wrench polytope concept is presented and wrench performance indices are introduced for planar parallel manipulators (PPMs). In Part II, the concept of wrench capabilities is extended to redundant manipulators and the wrench workspace of different PPMs is analyzed. The end-effector of a PPM is subject to the interaction of forces and moments. Wrench capabilities represent the maximum forces and moments that can be applied or sustained by the manipulator. The wrench capabilities of PPMs are determined by a linear mapping of the actuator output capabilities from the joint space to the task space. The analysis is based upon properly adjusting the actuator outputs to their extreme capabilities. The linear mapping results in a wrench polytope. It is shown that for non-redundant PPMs, one actuator output capability constrains the maximum wrench that can be applied (or sustained) with a plane in the wrench space yielding a facet of the polytope. Herein, the determination of wrench performance indices is presented without the expensive task of generating polytopes. Six study cases are presented and performance indices are derived for each study case.

This part of the paper investigates the wrench capabilities of redundantly actuated planar parallel manipulators (PPMs). The wrench capabilities of PPMs are determined by mapping a hypercube from the torque space into a polytope in the wrench space. For redundant PPMs, one actuator output capability constrains the wrench space with a smaller polytope that is contained inside the overall polytope. Performance indices are derived from six study cases. These indices are employed to analyze the wrench workspace for constant orientation of the mobile platform of the non-redundant 3-RRR PPM, and actuation redundant 4-RRR and 3-RRR PPMs, where the underline indicates the actuated joints. A comparison of the results shows that both of the redundantly-actuated PPMs give better wrench capabilities than the non-redundant PPM. However, it is shown that scaled for the operational cost (wrench capabilities divided by total actuation output) the non-redundant 3-RRR PPM provides the highest maximum reachable force, the 3-RRR PPM produces the highest isotropic force, and the 4-RRR yields the highest reachable moment.