Abstract
It is well known that the kinematic performance of a manipulator is closely related to the numerical stability of the mapping from the end effector velocity to the joint velocity. The so-called Jacobian matrix usually describes this mapping. Thus, the kinematic performance of a manipulator is closely related to the numerical condition of this Jacobian matrix. In this paper, we study the kinematic performance of a parallel manipulator by investigating the numerical conditioning of the Jacobian matrix and design of a parallel manipulator whose associated Jacobian matrix has the best numerical conditioning.