Complete kinematic calibration of a 6-RRRPRR parallel kinematic machine based on the optimal measurement configurations

Abstract

This paper presents a kinematic calibration of a 6-RRRPRR parallel kinematic mechanism with offset RR-joints that would be applied in space positioning field. In order to ensure highly accurate and highly effective calibration process, the complete error model, which contains offset universal joint errors, is established by differentiating inverse kinematic model. A calibration simulation comparison with non-complete error model shows that offset universal joint errors are crucial to improve the calibration accuracy. Using the error model, an optimal calibration configuration selection algorithm is developed to determine the least number of measurement configurations as well as the optimal selection of these configurations from the feasible configuration set. To verify the effectiveness of kinematic calibration, a simulation and experiment were performed. The results show that the developed approach can effectively improve accuracy of a parallel kinematic mechanism with relatively low number of calibration configurations.