Joint space-based measurement configurations selection for the kinematic calibration of Stewart platforms *

Kinematic calibration is one of the most effective ways to improve performances of the Stewart platforms in their industrial applications. Measurement configurations play an important role in kinematic calibration, which can effectively improve the identification accuracy of the geometric parameter errors and the stability of the least squares algorithm. Therefore, this study proposes a method to select measurement configurations based on the joint space in the perspective of geometry. The simulation is presented to discuss the proposed method has a higher identified accuracy in comparison with the conventional method which is uniform selected the measurement configurations in the workspace. Finally, the contrast experiments were carried out to verify the performances of the proposed method, and the actual measurement configurations were measured by the AICON 3D measurement system - MoveInspect XR. The results show that the proposed method has more room for improving the position and orientation accuracy by 93.996% and 90.764%, respectively. Moreover, the pose accuracy was improved by one order of magnitude after kinematic calibration.