摘要：Summary An attempt is presented towards a unified approach to compute kinematic performance of planar manipulators with the links connected in series, in loops and in combinations of both. The motivation of this work lies in the fact that serially connected links are normally selected for large manipulability and parallel manipulators are utilized for better stiffness. To acquire a topology suitable for a given task, the topological parameters can be considered variables in a manipulator design problems. However, since the complete kinematic model changes with each small change in the basic structure, a unified approach is important to work upon. A case of five-bar mechanism consisting of 2-degrees-of-freedom (dof) system is considered to demonstrate the proposed approach for performance analysis.
