New Geometric Approaches to the Analysis and Design of Stewart-Gough Platforms

In general, rearranging the legs of a Stewart-Gough platform, i.e., changing the locations of its leg attachments, modifies the platform singularity locus in a rather unexpected way. Nevertheless, some leg rearrangements have been recently found to leave singularities invariant. Identification of such rearrangements is useful not only for the kinematic analysis of the platforms, but also as a tool to redesign manipulators avoiding the implementation of multiple spherical joints, which are difficult to construct and have a small motion range. In this work, a summary of these singularity-invariant leg rearrangements is presented, and their practical implications are illustrated with several examples including well-known architectures.