Kinematic Calibration of a Parallel Manipulator for a Semi-physical Simulation System

In the application of a semi-physical simulation system of a space docking mechanism, the simulation precision is determined by pose accuracy of the parallel manipulator. In order to improve pose accuracy, an effective kinematic calibration method is presented to enable the full set of kinematic parameter errors to be estimated by measuring the docking mechanism's poses. A new calibration model that takes into account geometrical parameter errors and coordinates transformation errors is derived by using a differential geometry method. Based on the calibration model, an iterative least square algorithm is utilized to calculate the above errors. Simulation and experimental results show the calibration method can obviously improve pose accuracy.