This book shows how, through certain geometric transformations, some of the standard joints used in parallel robots can be replaced with lockable or non-holonomic joints. These substitutions allow for reducing the number of legs, and hence the number of actuators needed to control the robot, without losing the robot's ability to bring its mobile platform to the desired configuration. The kinematics of the most representative examples of these new designs are analyzed and their theoretical ...

Computational kinematics is an enthralling area of science with a rich spectrum of problems at the junction of mechanics, robotics, computer science, mathematics, and computer graphics. The covered topics include design and optimization of cable-driven robots, analysis of parallel manipulators, motion planning, numerical methods for mechanism calibration and optimization, geometric approaches to mechanism analysis and design, synthesis of mechanisms, kinematical issues in biomechanics, con...