The trends and progress attained in computational kinematics over a broad class of problems are grouped into six parts describing the main themes: kinematics algorithms, discussing kinematics problems in light of their solution algorithms; kinematics of mechanisms, studying problems related to specific mechanisms; singularities; workspace, discussing the determination of the workspace of given mechanisms; parallel manipulators; and motion and grasp planning, touching on computational geometry. The volume contains a representative sample of the most modern techniques available for kinetics...

Parallel robots are closed-loop mechanisms presenting very good performances in terms of accuracy, rigidity and ability to manipulate large loads. Parallel robots have been used in a large number of applications ranging from astronomy to flight simulators and are becoming increasingly popular in the field of machine-tool industry. This book presents a complete synthesis of the latest results on the possible mechanical architectures, analysis and synthesis of this type of mechanism. It is intended to be used by students (with over 100 exercises and numerous Internet addresses),...

The aim of this book is to provide an account of the state of the art in Com- putational Kinematics. We understand here under this term that branch of kinematics research involving intensive computations not only of the nu- merical type, but also of symbolic as well as geometric nature. Research in kinematics over the last decade has been remarkably ori- ented towards the computational aspects of kinematics problems. In fact, this work has been prompted by the need to answer fundamental questions such as the number of solutions, whether real or complex, that a given problem can admit as well...