New conservative stiffness mapping for the Stewart-Gough platform

Abstract

This paper presents a new conservative stiffness mapping for parallel manipulators. This new formulation properly obeys the law of the conservation of energy. The change in geometry of a parallel manipulator due to compliance is captured by an additional stiffness matrix, which has so far been neglected by other researchers. Numerical simulations of the planar and spatial Stewart-Gough platforms are conducted to verify the conservative stiffness mapping.