Determination of Closed Form Solution to the Workspace of Stewart Parallel Manipulators
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Tingting Huang; J. X. Yuan; J. S. Wang
- Source
- Volume 1A: 25th Biennial Mechanisms Conference.
- Subject
- Computer Science::Robotics
Control theory
Computer science
Workspace
Closed-form expression
- Language
A novel methodology is presented in this paper for the workspace analysis of Stewart parallel manipulators. The workspace is defined in such a way that enables a description to be made in a unified framework of both the position and orientation capabilities of the mobile platform. Given the orientation capability of the mobile platform which is described by the minimum reachable yaw angle, the piecewise closed solution to the position workspace boundary is formulated by means of differential geometry. It is indicated that the workspace boundary is in fact the cap of twelve envelope surfaces, each of which is generated by a family of spherical surfaces with the center moving along a two branch closed spherical curve. Two examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach.