The wrist plays the crucial role of orienting a hand or end effector without significant translational motion, a critical requirement of successful manipulation. In this paper, we present the kinematic design optimization a two degree of freedom universal, two-prismatic-spherical-spherical (U, 2-PSS) parallel wrist mechanism. By varying the geometric parameters of the mechanism, we examine configurations that maximize the Global Conditioning Index, a metric describing the quality of the motion and torque, over the desired workspace, which mimics a healthy human wrist range of motion in circumduction (flexion/extension and abduction/adduction). We further investigate the effects of sizing constraints on the resulting optimized design which satisfies the imposed sizing constraints.

This content is only available via PDF.
You do not currently have access to this content.