A Lie Group-Based Iterative Algorithm Framework for Numerically Solving Forward Kinematics of Gough-Stewart Platform

In this work, we began to take forward kinematics of the Gough-Stewart (G-S) platform as an unconstrained optimization problem on the Lie group-structured manifold SE(3) instead of simply relaxing its intrinsic orthogonal constraint when algorithms are updated on six-dimensional local flat Euclidean space or adding extra unit norm constraint when orientation parts are parametrized by a unit quaternion. With this thought in mind, we construct two kinds of iterative problem-solving algorithms (Gauss-Newton (G-N) and Levenberg-Marquardt (L-M)) with mathematical tools from the Lie group and Lie algebra. Finally, a case study for a general G-S platform was carried out to compare these two kinds of algorithms on SE(3) with corresponding algorithms that updated on six-dimensional flat Euclidean space or seven-dimensional quaternion-based parametrization Euclidean space. Experiment results demonstrate that those algorithms on SE(3) behave better than others in convergence performance especially when the initial guess selection is near to branch solutions.