A calibration procedure for reconfigurable Gough-Stewart manipulators

This paper introduces a calibration procedure for the identification of the geometrical parameters of a reconfigurable Gough-Stewart parallel manipulator. By using the proposed method, the geometry of a general Gough-Stewart platform can be evaluated through the measurement of the distance between couples of points on the base and mobile platform, repeated for a given set of different poses of the manipulator. The mathematical modelling of the problem is described and a numeric algorithm for an efficient solution to the problem is proposed. Furthermore, an application of the proposed method is discussed with a numerical example, and the behaviour of the calibration procedure is analysed as a function of the number of acquisitions and the number of poses. Crown Copyright (C) 2020 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.