Closed-Form Determination of the Location of a Rigid Body by Seven In-Parallel Linear Transducers

Abstract

The paper presents an original analytic procedure for unambiguously determining the relative position and orientation (location) of two rigid bodies based on the readings from seven linear transducers. Each transducer connects two points arbitrarily chosen on the two bodies. The sought-for rigid-body location simply results by solving linear equations. The proposed procedure is suitable for implementation in control of fully-parallel manipulators with general geometry. A numerical example shows application of the reported results to a case study.