Description
In order to facilitate a wider use of parallel robots and to make use of their inherent advantages, the drawbacks to these structures, such as singularities in the workspace or the small ratio of workspace to installation space, need to be diminished. The latter can be tackled using an approach presented in this article. An overall workspace, which is substantially larger than the original one, can be obtained by using several robot-configurations corresponding to different working and assembly modes (different solutions of the inverse and direct kinematic problem). The general procedure to change between the configurations requires the passing through singularities and is described exemplarily first for a simple planar manipulator and subsequently for a more complex spatial parallel structure.
