Kinematic calibration of gantry hybrid machine tool based on estimation error and local measurement information

This paper presents the kinematic calibration of a four degrees-of-freedom (DOF) hybrid machine tool based on a novel planar 3-DOFs parallel mechanism and a long movement of the worktable. Closed-form solutions are developed for both the inverse and direct kinematics about the parallel mechanism. The error model is built and the mechanism accuracy is investigated. Two types of kinematic calibration method are proposed by a simple measurement device. The first type of calibration method is based on estimation error, and can easy improve the machine tool accuracy quickly by estimating the error trends. The second type of kinematic calibration method is based on local measurement information, which includes the position errors and does not include the pose errors of the machine tool. The calibration tests showed the effectiveness of the calibration methods, which can be useful for the similar types of parallel machine tool.