Kinematic Identification of Parallel Mechanisms by a Divide and Conquer Strategy

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.