Welcome

Following the first workshop on parallel mechanisms and manipulators in Québec held by Clément Gosselin and Imme Ebert-Uphoff, second edition in Montpellier held by François Pierrot, Nicolas Andreff, Olivier Company, Marc Gouttefarde and Sébastien Krut, and third edition in Tianjin held by Tian Huang and Jian Dai, we are organizing the fourth edition in 2020 in Belfast, United Kingdom.

UK is a founding member of IFToMM and has carried out the pioneering work in the field of parallel mechanisms / manipulators / robots / machines. Dated back to 1940's, Dr. Eric Gough, a distinguished automotive engineer at Dunlop Rubber Co., Birmingham, England, invented and built the first octahedral hexapod, which changed the industry and has been replicated over a thousand times. Recent pioneering work is exampled by the research in the field of reconfigurable mechanisms and the sub-field of metamorphic mechanisms.

Queen's University Belfast (QUB), the host of this conference, is one of the oldest Russel Group Universities in the UK. QUB made a great contribution to the development of parallel kinematic technology. Back to early 1990’s, QUB conducted the feasibility study for the first prototype of parallel kinematic machine (PKM) tools in the world, collaborated with the Ingersoll Milling Machine Company. Recently QUB developed a ground-breaking application technology with the Exechon PKM for automated aircraft assembly. Joint work between QUB and King’s College London pushes the theoretical work into practice.

Although a significant progress has been made in the field, there are still a lot of interesting and intractable challenges ahead. Parallel 2020 seeks to bring together experts in the area from around the globe in order to disseminate recent research progress and to identify the most promising future research directions for parallel mechanisms / manipulators / robots and parallel kinematic machine technology, in order to tackle these challenges effectively, efficiently and collaboratively, for a better world.

Due to Covid-19, it is unfortunate we cannot physically convene at Belfast, but we arrange a very nice web conference for you to listen, to question, to interact and to participate. We also welcome you to visit Belfast and visit QUB when circumstances allow. We shall be waiting for you here.

We wish you enjoy the virtual conference and find it useful.