| This thesis studies the design of spatial mechanisms and manipulators. Mechanisms are mechanical devices composed of links interconnected by joints. These devices are usually used to transfer forces and motions in a prescribed manner. In recent years, complex spatial robotic manipulators and mechanisms have attracted the interest of machine designers because they can combine high dexterity with complex three dimensional trajectories, relatively large workspaces and high accuracy. Examples of such devices include high-speed assembly machines, prosthetic devices and walking robots. The synthesis of such devices is the main focus of this thesis.; Kinematic synthesis is the process of designing a mechanism to accomplish a specified task. This thesis will focus on the dimensional synthesis of serial manipulators for the spatial rigid body guidance problem, which is the determination of the dimensions of the structural parameters of a mechanism when the position and orientation of a few desired end-effector configurations are given. The rigid body guidance problem is also known as the geometric design problem.; The field of spatial kinematic synthesis, although after its birth for over thirty years, is still in its infancy. In this research, several difficult kinematic design problems of spatial 3-links manipulators with open-chain topology are solved using various techniques from computational algebraic geometry, including resultants, polynomial continuation and interval analysis. These results lead to several new computational algorithms suitable for design automation. |
