Nowadays an important research effort is devoted to lower mobility parallel manipulators. The existing solutions often suffer from parallel mechanisms drawbacks, i.e. small workspace and limited rotation capability. A new concept of parallel manipulators providing Schoen flies motions (motions of well-known SCARA robot) is introduced in this paper. The proposed manipulator, based on the idea of articulated traveling plate explored by the authors, has an unlimited rotation capability without using motion transformation, ampli fication neither redundancy.

This paper introduces a four-degree-of-freedom parallel manipulator dedicated to pick-and-place. It has been developed with the goal of reaching very high speed. This paper shows that its architecture is particularly well adapted to high dynamics. Indeed, it is an evolution of Delta, H4 and 14 robots architectures: it keeps the advantages of these existing robots, while overcoming their drawbacks. In addition, an optimization method based on velocity using adept motion has been developed and applied to this high speed parallel robot. All these considerations led to experimentations that proved we can reach high accelerations (13 G) and obtain a cycle time of 0.28 s.