Kinematics of Spatial Parallel Manipulators With Tetrahedron Coordinates

This paper proposes a kinematics model with four noncoplanar points' Cartesian coordinates for a spatial parallel manipulator, which is called the tetrahedron coordinate method. The sufficient and necessary criteria of utilizing the Cartesian coordinates of the four noncoplanar points are proved. Because the constraint equations are either quadratic or linear, and the coordinates are complete Cartesian, the derivative matrix of the constraint equations only consists of linear or constant elements that are the advantages of the general natural coordinate method as well. However, the number of variables of the general natural coordinate method will increase with the increasing number of investigated points. The tetrahedron coordinate approach proposed in this paper does not need to induce any new variables when more points on the manipulator are considered. As a result, it has a prevailing advantage over the general natural coordinate method. This advantage is especially explicit when establishing the kinematics models for complex spatial parallel manipulators with three to six degrees of freedom, the virtues of which are demonstrated by a case study.