Accuracy Analysis of Parallel Manipulators With Joint Clearance

Abstract

Due to joint clearance, a parallel manipulator’s end-effector exhibits position and orientation (or collectively referred to as pose) errors of various degrees. This paper aims to provide a systematic study of the error analysis problem for a general parallel manipulator influenced by joint clearance. We propose an error prediction model that is applicable to planar or spatial parallel manipulators that are either overconstrained or nonoverconstrained. By formulating the problem as a standard convex optimization problem, the maximal pose error in a prescribed workspace can be efficiently computed. We present several numerical examples to show the applicability and the efficiency of the proposed method.