Optimum design of 3-3 stewart platform considering inertia property

Abstract

Optimum design is a pivotal approach to fulfill the potential advantages of the parallel manipulator in practical applications. This paper concerns the optimum design issue of the 3-3 Stewart platform considering the inertia property, in addition to the kinematic performance. On the basis of spherical usable workspace, global conditioning index (GCI) is analyzed. Atlases of the workspace and GCI are deduced with the established nondimensional design space. Further, after dynamic modeling, the global inertia index (GII) is deduced from the joint-space inertia matrix, and corresponding GII atlases are drawn. In particular, an example is presented to illustrate the process of obtaining the practical optimum results based on these non-dimensional atlases. Since both kinematic and dynamic properties are considered, the optimum result will possess comprehensive performance improvements. © 2013 Zhu-Feng Shao et al.