Kinematic study of Stewart platform based on dual quaternion method

The Stewart platform, as a multi-degree-of-freedom parallel mechanism, is promising for a wide range of applications in industrial automation, flight simulation, and medical devices. Studying the kinematic characteristics of the Stewart platform and providing mathematical models and solution methods can achieve accurate control of its motion and position. In this paper, based on the 6-UPS-type Stewart parallel robot platform, the concept of dual quaternion is introduced, the kinematic properties of the Stewart platform are explored, and an efficient solution algorithm for parallel robot kinematics is proposed. The results show that in describing the kinematics of parallel robots, the dual quaternion method has a clear advantage with a more concise representation and fewer numbers of unknowns used to represent the rigid-body poses.