Estimating the Controllable Workspace of Tendon-Based Stewart Platforms

Abstract

The controllable workspace of a tendon-based Stewart Platform is the set of postures where forces and torques at the end-effector can be con trolled. A necessary and suffcient condition is given for those postures where forces can be controlled, thus, a superset of the controllable workspace can be calculated easily. External forces are modeled as an additional tendons fixed at infinity by introducing an un usual compactification of R^n that contains one infinitely distant point for each direction.