Yet another approach to the Gough-Stewart platform forward kinematics

Abstract

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The forward kinematics of the Gough-Stewart platform, and their simplified versions in which some leg endpoints coalesce, has been typically solved using variable elimination methods. In this paper, we cast doubts on whether this is the easiest way to solve the problem. We will see how the indirect approach in which the length of some extra virtual legs is first computed leads to important simplifications. In particular, we provide a procedure to solve 30 out of 34 possible topologies for a Gough-Stewart platform without variable elimination.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft