POSITION AND ORIENTATION CHARACTERISTIC EQUATION FOR TOPOLOGICAL DESIGN OF PARALLEL MECHANISMS

摘要

This paper presents the explicit mapping relations between topological structure of parallel mechanism and position and orientation characteristic (in short, POC) of its motion output link. It deals with: (1) The symbolic representation and the invariant of topological structure of mechanism; (2) The matrix representation of POC of motion output link; (3) The POC equations of parallel mechanism and its symbolic operation rules. The symbolic operation involves simple mathematic tools and fewer operation rules, and has clear geometrical meaning. So, it is easy to use. The forward operation of the POC equations can be used for structural analysis; its inverse operation can be used for structural synthesis. The method proposed in this paper is totally different from the methods based on screw theory and based on displacement subgroup.