Effects of Spherical Clearance Joint on Dynamics of Redundant Driving Spatial Parallel Mechanism

SUMMARY This paper proposes a dynamic modeling method of redundant drive spatial parallel mechanism, dynamics of 4-UPS-RPU redundant driving spatial parallel mechanism considering spherical joint clearance are analyzed. The dynamic equation of spherical joint clearance with Lagrange multiplier is built. The influences of single clearance and multiple clearances on dynamic responses of redundant drive spatial parallel mechanisms are analyzed under different clearance values. The results show that the dynamic characteristics of the mechanism with single clearance are basically consistent with the ideal situation, and the dynamic characteristics of the mechanism with multi-clearance are significantly different from the ideal situation.

Analysis of a mechanism with redundant drive for antenna pointing

Orientation accuracy is a key factor in the design of mechanisms for antenna pointing. Our design uses a redundantly actuated parallel mechanism which may provide an effective way to solve this problem, and even can increase its payload capability and reliability. The presented mechanism can be driven by rotary motors fixed on the base to reduce the inertia of the moving parts and to lower the power consumption. The mechanism is redundantly actuated by three arms, and is used as a two-dimensional antenna tracking and pointing device. Both the forward and inverse kinematics are investigated to find all the possible solutions. Detailed characters of the platform are analyzed to demonstrate the advantages in eliminating singularities and improving pointing accuracy. A method of calculating the overconstrained orientational error is also proposed based on the differential kinematics. All the methods are verified by numerical examples.