Parallel Manipulators: Practical Applications and Kinematic Design Criteria. Towards the Modular Reconfigurable Robots

Modern robotic manipulators play an essential role in industry, developing several tasks in an easy way, enhancing the accuracy of the final product and reducing the executing time. Also they can be found in other fields as aerospace industry, several medical applications, gaming industry, and so on. In particular, the parallel manipulators have acquired a great relevance in the last years. Indeed, many research activities and projects deal with the study and development of this type of robots. Nevertheless, usually, a bilateral communication between industry and research does not exist, even among the different existing research areas. This causes a lack of knowledge regarding works that have been carried out, the ones that are under development and the possible future investigations. Hence, once a specific field of knowledge has acquired a certain level of maturity, it is convenient to reflect its current state of the art. In this sense, the authors of this paper present a review of the different fields in which parallel manipulators have a significant participation, and also the most active research topics in the analysis and design of these robots. Besides, several contributions of the authors to this field are cited.