Vision-based self-calibration and control of parallel kinematic mechanisms without proprioceptive sensing

This work is a synthesis of our experience over parallel kinematic machine control, which aims at changing the standard conceptual approach to this problem. Indeed, since the task space, the state space and the measurement space can coincide in this class of mechanisms, we came to redefine the complete modelling, identification and control methodology. Thus, it is shown in this paper that, generically and with the help of sensor-based control, this methodology does not require any joint measurement, thus opening a path to simplified mechanical design and reducing the number of kinematic parameters to identify. This novel approach is illustrated on the reference parallel kinematic mechanism (the Gough–Stewart platform) with vision as the exteroceptive sensor. This work was supported by European Community through the Integrated Project NEXT number 0011815. It was initially published in the Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR’07), Jeju, Korea, 21–24 August 2007 [3]. During this work, Philippe Martinet was holding a visiting professor position at the Intelligent Service Robotics Center at Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, South Korea.