Singularity-free spheres in the position and orientation workspaces of Stewart platform manipulators

This paper presents the computation of singularity-free regions in the position and orientation workspaces of Stewart platform manipulators (SPMs). Notwithstanding several previous publications in this regard, certain issues persist, such as the unavailability of analytical solutions and the consequent lack of accurate estimates of the numbers of solutions in various cases; the improper use of an incompatible metric while finding such regions inside SO(3) or SE(3). In this paper, the singularity-free regions have been envisaged as spheres in either R3 or SO(3). An analytical formulation for identifying such singularity-free spheres (SFSs) is presented. Several algebraic methods are explored to solve the resulting set of polynomial equations, leading to valuable insights into the numbers of (finite, complex) solutions to this problem, in both the position and the orientation workspaces. A physically meaningful and mathematically sound metric is used while computing the SFS in the orientation workspace. The formulation and computational algorithms have been demonstrated by identifying the SFSs (in R3 as well as SO(3)) for multiple architectures of the SPM through implementations in the C language.