SCREW THEORY AND HIGHER-ORDER KINEMATIC ANALYSIS OF OPEN SERIAL AND CLOSED CHAINS

In a pair of recent contributions by the authors of this paper, it has been shown that screw theory can be successfully employed in the acce leration analysis of open and closed spatial chains. In this contribut ion, a novel method for the velocity, acceleration, and jerk analysis of spatial chains is introduced. The method is based in obtaining recu rsive expressions for the velocity, acceleration, and jerk of the end effector of a serial manipulator. This new method facilitates greatly the derivation of some well known results concerning the velocity and acceleration analyses of spatial chains. Furthermore, the method provi des proofs of several new results for the jerk analysis which were not possible using methods developed previously. In addition, the contrib ution shows how the results of open serial chains can be applied to cl osed chains and parallel manipulators. Finally, the method can be easi ly generalized to higher order analyses. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd . All rights reserved.