Design and Kinematic Analysis of a 4-DOF Serial-Parallel Manipulator for a Driving Simulator

This paper presents the kinematic analysis and the development of a 4-degree-of-freedom serial-parallel mechanism for large commercial vehicle driving simulators. The degrees of freedom are selected according to the target maneuvers and the structure of human motion perception organs. Several kinematic properties of parallel part of the mechanism under study are investigated, including the inverse and the forward kinematics problems, workspace determination, singularity, and kinematic sensitivity analysis. The workspace of the parallel part of the mechanism is obtained by interval analysis. Moreover, using elimination theory, a univariate expression representing the forward kinematics solution of the parallel part is obtained.