A Force-reflecting hand controller(FRHC) can provide the kinesthetic information obtained from a slave manipulator to the operator of a teleoperation system. This thesis presents the design and the analysis of a 6-degree-of-freedom force-reflecting hand controller using fivebar parallel mechanism. The goal of this thesis is to construct a superior hand controller that can provide large workspace and good force-reflecting ability. The forward kinematics of the fivebar parallel mechanism has been calculated in real-time using three pin-joint sensors in addition to six actuator position sensors. A force decomposition approach is used to compute the Jacobian. The workspace of the fivebar parallel mechanism has been analyzed numerically using inverse kinematics. To analyze the characteristics of the fivebar parallel mechanism, it has been compared with the other three parallel mechanism. Workspace and manipulability are used as a design guide to determine the structure dimensions such as the leg length and the sizes of upper and lower platforms. The force-reflecting hand controller using the fivebar parallel mechanism has been constructed and tested to verify the feasibility of the design concept.
