Computation of the safe working zones of Planar and Spatial Parallel Manipulators.

This paper presents the computation of the safe working zone (SWZ) of a parallel manipulator having three degrees of freedom. The SWZ is defined as a continuous subset of the workspace, wherein the manipulator does not suffer any singularity, and is also free from the issues of link interference and physical limits on its joints. The proposed theory is illustrated via application to two parallel manipulators: a planar 3-R_RR manipulator and a spatial manipulator, namely, MaPaMan-I. It is also shown how the analyses can be applied to any parallel manipulator having three degrees of freedom, planar or spatial.