A redundantly actuated planar 3-degree-of-freedom parallel mechanism is analyzed to show its high application potential as a haptic device. Its structure along with the closed form forward position solutions is briefly discussed. Then its geometric and kinematic characteristics via singularity analysis, the kinematic isotropy index, and the input-output force transmission ratio are investigated both for the redundantly actuated cases and for the non-redundantly actuated case. In addition, comparative joint torque simulations of the mechanism with different number of redundant actuations as well as without redundant actuation are conducted to confirm the improved joint torque distribution characteristics. Through these analyses it is shown that the geometric and kinematic characteristics of the redundantly actuated mechanism are superior to the ones of the mechanism without redundant actuation. Thus, it can be concluded that the suggested planar mechanism with redundant actuation has a very high potential for haptic device applications.

This paper focuses on the vibration analysis of planar cable–driven parallel robots on their configurations. Despite of many advantages of the cable robots, elasticity of the cables may cause the vibration at the existence of external disturbance, resulting in deterioration of positioning accuracy. According to the vibration theory, having high first order natural frequency can prevent resonance with low frequency disturbance from the surrounding environment. A series of simulations showed that choosing frame / end-effector shape and cable connection method affects robots’ natural frequency. For the precise simulation, the cables are modeled as linear springs and axial vibration of cables is mainly considered. Aspect ratios of the frame and end-effector are defined as non-dimensional parameters while their areas are fixed. It was shown that vibration analysis guides to design a planar cable robot in terms of high capacity to reduce vibration.

As most infrastructure have low natural frequency for vibration, an energy harvester to operate wireless sensors for them should be aimed to low frequency and have high output efficiency. This study proposes the energy harvester with parallel-connected single crystal ceramic for low frequency in order to gain enhanced efficiency. The performance is confirmed by the experiment using the acceleration data of hangers in Yeongjong Bridge.