An Method for Forward Kinematics of Stewart Parallel Manipulators

A general 6-DOF parallel manipulator has 40 solutions to forward kinemantics, but most of them are in imaginary domain. This paper presents a simple numerical method for forward kinematics of a general 6-DOF parallel manipulators, which can generate a unique actual solution directly. This method has advantage over conventional numerical iteration method, which is not rely on the initial values and this method is numerically stable and computationally efficient. Numerical example and simulation results verify correctness and effectiveness of the method.

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