Parallel Robots for Grasping Tasks: A Review

Abstract This article presents a review of the use of parallel robots for grasping tasks. Three main families are considered: kinematically redundant parallel robots, reconfigurable parallel robots, and parallel-hand architectures; a complementary category of unconventional architectures is also presented. The use and consistency of these definitions in the literature are examined. Each family is then described using a common mathematical framework to clarify its characteristics and properties. For reconfigurable platforms, two subfamilies are defined: platforms with closed-loop chains and platforms with open-loop chains. A kinematic analysis is presented for each type of robot, including inverse kinematics formulations and velocity models. Finally, the review summarizes the different approaches to implementing grasping in parallel robots, with the aim of identifying promising design directions and outlining potential future trends. The analysis highlights how structural choices directly influence the grasping capability, suggesting that unified modeling frameworks and a comparison help in the design of parallel robots with grasping capabilities.