Finding the common tangents to four spheres via dimensionality reduction

One of the advantages of formulating position analysis problems in terms of distances is that the dimension of the problem can be reduced by projecting the problem onto a subspace. Although, in general, this operation does not provide a significant advantage, when parallelism or alignment constraint...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Porta Pleite, Josep Maria|||0000-0002-5056-1717; Thomas, Federico|||0000-0001-9341-5528
Format: Book chapter
Publication date:2024
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repository:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/428650
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/428650
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64057-5_14
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Automation
Classificació INSPEC::Automation
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Robòtica
Description
Summary:One of the advantages of formulating position analysis problems in terms of distances is that the dimension of the problem can be reduced by projecting the problem onto a subspace. Although, in general, this operation does not provide a significant advantage, when parallelism or alignment constraints must be enforced, a proper projection results in an important simplification. This is the case when computing the common tangents to four spheres in R^3. In this paper, we first show how this problem can be formulated in terms of just five points in R^2 thanks to projection, and then this is applied to solve the forward kinematics of the 4-SPC parallel robot.