Welcome to the most comprehensive on-line resource in the field of parallel robots (hexapods, Gough-Stewart platforms, parallel kinematic machines, motion bases, etc.).

What's New? Positions available Scholarships for one Ph.D. student and one post-doctoral fellow are currently available at the Control and Robotics Laboratory of ÉTS (Montreal, Canada). Experience in mechanical design and/or calibration of parallel robots is a must. Candidates should contact Prof. Ilian Bonev. A fourth Java applet has been added Hopefully, students will now better understand Euler angles and consecutive rotations with this new Java applet. Yet another Delta robot... That the Delta robot is the most successful parallel robot is common knowledge. But this new Delta will finally bring parallel robots to the mass market (more than 1000 units already sold). The Falcon is a haptic device available for only $150. The fastest parallel robot Adept Technology released the Quattro, which at 240 cycles per minute is industry's fastest pick-and-place robot. The robot was invented by Dr. François Pierrot and his team, in collaboration with Fatronik. Adept has already sold more than 200 Quattro robots.   Probably the most intriguing 1-DOF parallel robot... Read about the ROBO 003 – an innovative watch winder based on an amazing 1-DOF wobbling three-legged parallel robot. Looks like yet another hexapod but it's not! Read about the Deltapod – an original flexible fixturing by ABB. Tired of hexapod motion bases? This family business has modified the well-known 3-RPS zero-torsion parallel robot and made an innovative 3-DOF ride simulator that I wish I had at home. More that 40 of these motion systems have already been sold.   It's raining Delta robots... The PacDrive Robot P3 is the latest offspring of the Delta robot democratization. The new Delta is manufactured by ELAU, Schneider Electric’s packaging automation division. And another Delta robot... FAUDE Group now offers the Flexmotion PKM, which is basically a range of linear Delta robots for various applications. The golden age of parallel robots?   ELAU has also launched a 3-axis pick-and-place parallel robot called PacDrive Robot D2. The new robot is obviously a lower-cost alternative to current Deltas (which typically cost $60,000). More simple but effective novel designs PWR-Pack builds both ELAU's parallel robots, under the names UNIGRABBER 2 and UNIGRABBER D4, in addition to an four-bas-baser robot, dubbed the UNIGRABBER 3.     A new motion system with only three legs E-Motion 6000 is the latest 3-DOF motion platform developed by Bosch Rexroth. This motion simulatior is a zero-torsion parallel mechanism allowing vertical translation and rotation about horizontal axes. The first "two-mode" three-axes PKM   Simplex now offers a one-of-a-kind three-axes PKM called Simparallel. The new reconfigurable PKM alows one translation and one of two possible rotations. A promising new software package for parallel robots QSpider is a new Russian project for the development of a free software package for simulating mechanisms. A simple four-bar mechanism... The LongPen is nothing but a four-bar mechanism that holds a pen, yet it gets tremendous media coverage. Certainly the most precise hexapod among large ones Lapic was quitely developing hexapod CMMs for the last three decades. But now this Russian company offers a large number of high-precision hexapod CMMs. Delta robots get smaller and smaller Asyril starts commercializing CSEM's Pocket Delta robots.

Reference web sites:   Dr. Merlet's Site   Singularities Database

Main reference books: 

	Parallel Robots by J.-P. Merlet.
	Type Synthesis of Parallel Mechanisms by X. Kong and C.M. Gosselin.
	Structural Synthesis of Parallel Robots by G. Gogu.
	Robot Analysis: The Mechanics of Serial and Parallel Manipulators by L.-W. Tsai.
	The Numerical Solution of Systems of Polynomials: Arising in Engineering and Science by Andrew J. Sommese and Charles W. Wampler II.