Kinematic identification of parallel mechanisms by a divide and conquer strategy

Abstract

This paper presents a Divide and Conquer strategy to estimate the kinematic parameters of parallel symmetrical mechanisms -- The Divide and Conquer kinematic identification is designed and performed independently for each leg of the mechanism -- The estimation of the kinematic parameters is performed using the inverse calibration method -- The identification poses are selected optimizing the observability of the kinematic parameters from a Jacobian identification matrix -- With respect to traditional identification methods the main advantages of the proposed Divide and Conquer kinematic identification strategy are: (i) reduction of the kinematic identification computational costs, (ii) improvement of the numerical efficiency of the kinematic identification algorithm and, (iii) improvement of the kinematic identification results -- The contributions of the paper are: (i) The formalization of the inverse calibration method as the Divide and Conquer strategy for the kinematic identification of parallel symmetrical mechanisms and, (ii) a new kinematic identification protocol based on the Divide and Conquer strategy -- As an application of the proposed kinematic identification protocol the identification of a planar 5R symmetrical mechanism is simulated -- The performance of the calibrated mechanism is evaluated by updating the kinematic model with the estimated parameters and developing simulations