Six d.o.f. displacement measuring device based on a modified Stewart platform

Acquisition of the displacements and deformations of a loaded component is generally a not easy operation. This is especially the case as the component often presents a complex geometry and the deformations involve more degrees of freedom or a combination of them.Measurement devices used for this kind of application often allow to obtain simplified measurements.This paper presents a novel measurement device, consisting of six displacement sensors mounted as a parallel mechanism, capable to measure the global deformation of a component in terms of translations and rotations. The deformations are obtained by applying the direct kinematic equations to convert the six displacements read from the six sensors into the three translations and rotations representing the deformation of the component.The geometry of the device leads to write simplified equations for the direct kinematic that can be solved with a semi-numerical procedure implemented in a program written in Matlab environment.The results given by this procedure have been validated with the positions obtained from a 3D CAD model of the device, showing perfect agreement between the results.A prototype has been made and tested on a workbench.