Embedded actuators offer a promising approach to counteract unwanted vibrations arising in the structure of light-weight parallel manipulators. These actuators and the elasticity of the robot structure introduce additional degrees of freedom, increasing the mathematical and computational effort in the description of the robot kinematics and dynamics.
In this paper computationally efficient algorithms for the calculation of the Jacobian and the direct dynamics of parallel robots are presented which explicitly exploit specific properties of parallel structures. The new concepts have been applied to the Five-Bar planar parallel manipulator and evaluated by comparison with conventional techniques. Based upon the presented methods, a model-based robust control strategy has been developed and validated using the experimental results obtained from the implementation for the Five-Bar manipulator.