Kinematic design of a configurable terrain simulator platform for robotic legs

This paper presents the design of a novel configurable Terrain Simulator Platform (TSP) developed for robotic legs to test and verify their motion performance during the interaction with different terrains. The TSP is a test device able to emulate different terrains such as slope, vertical step, stairs and even dynamically varied terrain by the movements of the moving platform to simulate complicated terrains in natural environments. A planar PRR parallel mechanism is chosen to produce desired motions of the moving platform. The kinematics of the PRR mechanism including forward and inverse kinematics are presented. Different types of singularities are studied and analysed. The measures adopted in design to get rid of forward kinematics singularity in desired workspace are presented. At last, the workspace without forward singularity are obtained.

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