A test case for modelling PKMs with generic architectures in a 3D simulation environment

Parallel machines are increasingly used in a large number of applications. Currently there is no commercial software able to provide a user-friendly and effective environment for simulating and modelling the wide variety of kinematic arrangements in which parallel mechanisms can be designed. In order to provide such a tool a technique to model and simulate parallel machines with little effort is presented. The related procedure has been integrated and tested in Visual Components 3DCreate simulation software. The method is based on the formulation of parallel machine kinematics in terms of Product-of-Exponential formulae (PoE) and has been tested on the 3 DOF manipulator of VERNE, a machine-tool designed and built by Fatronik. Results show that accuracy and computation time of the proposed inverse kinematics algorithm make it suitable for demanding applications such as real-time control and micromachining.