CONCISE SOLUTION OF FORWARD KINEMATICS ANALYSIS OF PARALLEL MECHANISM IN 6-SPS SIMILAR PLATFORM

The forward kinematics analysis of a special 6-SPS Stewart platform is presented, in which both the base and the mobile platforms are hexagon and similar to each other. The forward kinematics of the parallel mechanism is a complicated nonlinear problem, however. there exists a class of parallel kinematics platforms that have the simplest forward kinematics. By introducing quaternion to represent the rotary transformation matrix and applying dual space method to eliminate the high degree polynomials, the forward kinematics can be expressed by a set of quadratic algebra equations, which decouple the position and the orientation of the mobile platform. The approach only requires solving one-variable quadratic equations. Besides, spurious complex roots are automatically avoided. Eight possible solutions are obtained from the approach. It discovers the inner symmetry relationship between the solutions of the forward kinematics.