Design and kinematic analysis of a 4-DOF serial-parallel manipulator for urban bus driving simulator

This paper presents the kinematic analysis and the development of a 4-degree-of-freedom serial-parallel mechanism for urban bus driving simulators. Necessary degrees of freedom are selected according to the target maneuvers and the structure of human motion perception organs. Several kinematic properties of parallel part of the mechanism under study are investigated, including the inverse and forward kinematic problems, workspace determination, singularity and kinematic sensitivity analysis. The workspace of the parallel part of the mechanism is obtained by means of interval analysis. Moreover, using elimination theory, a univariate expression representing the forward kinematic solution of the parallel part is obtained.