Analysis of a New Workspace of the Hexaglide as a Motion Simulator for Fuel Tanker Trucks

The hexaglide is a 6-DOF fully parallel mechanism characterized by six length-constant legs and three parallel guide rails. The application of this architecture for simulating the motions of fuel tanker trucks is firstly presented. The kinematic model of the simulator is established, the inverse kinematics is analyzed, and the kinematic constraints are summarized. Then a new type of workspace called the position workspace with a specified orientation requirement is proposed, which takes into account the strong coupling between position workspace and orientation workspace. And two approaches to obtaining this workspace are also developed and demonstrated by the preliminary workspace analysis of the simulator.