Comparison of Hybrid and Parallel Architectures for Two-Degrees-of-Freedom Planar Robot Legs

A comparative analysis between a hybrid and a parallel manipulator, to study the influence of their architecture on performance, is presented in this paper. The two manipulators are modifications of a serial 2-R manipulator and a five-bar manipulator, respectively. They are altered in a way that they both share the same arrangement of the links, while having a distinction only in the actuator arrangement. Indices of performance, such as the measure of manipulability, local conditioning index, and global conditioning index are used to compare their performance.