The Effect of Position and Orientation Characteristic on the Forward Position Solution of Parallel Mechanisms

Abstract

The author’s extensive experience on forward position solution (FPS) of numerous spatial parallel mechanisms (PMs) leads to an important observation that the type and number of position and orientation characteristics (POC) of the moving platform significantly affect the forward position analysis of PMs. Some specific type of POCs not only makes the forward kinematic modelling of the PM simple but also leads to symbolic FPS. The reason is that these specific POCs introduce some auxiliary constrained position equations. Therefore, simple mathematical method can be used to find the symbolic solutions. A three-translation (3T) PM is taken as an example to derive its symbolic forward position solutions for illustration.