Wrench Capability of Hyper-redundant Planar Parallel Manipulators

In this paper a procedure to obtain the wrench capability in three hyper-redundant manipulators with 7, 8 and 9 Degrees of Freedom is presented. The studied manipulators are a \(7\underline{R}RR\) manipulator, a \(8\underline{R}RR\) manipulator and a \(9\underline{R}RR\) manipulator. The wrench capability of a manipulator is formally defined as the maximum force/moment that a manipulator can apply or sustain for a given posture and without overpassing the limits of their actuators. In this study, the wrench capability characteristics are obtained through the optimization of the kineto-static model of the studied manipulators by using a Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm. Some wrench capability polygons and polytopes are obtained for the studied manipulators.