The aim of this paper is to define a process to expand the overall reachable workspace of the 5R mechanism and to conduct feasible path planning between configurations within that space, even in cases where the initial and final configurations exist in different modes. It is known that if a mechanism has multiple working modes, there is a unique workspace for each configuration, and they are often only partially connected to each other in a complex manner. Serial singularities allow the mechanism to remain stiff and controllable. These regions are utilised to link disconnected workspaces to maximise the overall reachable workspace to form the global workspace road map. This paper focuses on the 2-DOF path planning of the 5R planar mechanism. A generalised method for analysing complex workspaces of parallel mechanisms is proposed, the rotary disk search for finding the connected reachable workspace, a strategy for global path finding by analysing the global workspace road map and local path generation are discussed.
An overview of unmanned vehicle path planning algorithms