Liaison linkages (Q321280)

A classical problem of theoretical kinematics, originally posed at the beginning of the 20th century, asks for all space motions with ``many'' spherical trajectories. It re-surfaced in the 1990s in an engineering context: Determine all possible self-motions of Stewart Gough platforms. These are parallel robot manipulators where six points of a fixed base are connected to six points of a moving platform by rods of variable lengths. In general, a given sixtuple of lengths gives rise to up to 40 different poses of the platform. If infinitely many poses are possible, one speaks of a \textit{self-motion}. With a suitable embedding of \(\mathrm{SE}(3)\) in a projective space, self motions become algebraic curves. In this paper, the authors provide an upper bound for the degree of these curves for sufficiently general Stewart Gough platforms and in case of the so-called ``conformal embedding''. This embedding is tailored towards investigations of space motions with many spherical trajectories as the sphere constraints become linear [\textit{M. Gallet} et al., J. Geom. 106, No. 2, 211--228 (2015; Zbl 1327.53013)]. Bounding the conformal degree of the configuration curve is an important step towards the full classification of Stewart Gough platforms with self-motions. A Stewart Gough platform is called ``planar'' if the two sixtuples of anchor points in base and platform, respectively, are planar and ``equiformal'' if these sixtuples correspond in a similarity transformation. A sixtuple of points is called ``parallel'' if it contains two pairs of points such that the line spanned by one pair is parallel to the line spanned by the other. The main result of this paper is the upper bound 28 for the conformal degree of non-planar and non-equiform Stewart Gough platforms with non-parallel base and platform. The authors also present families where these bounds are actually attained. For planar Stewart Gough platforms the upper bound is~40. The proof of the main result is rather long and requires a lot of case distinctions. The construction of families of Stewart Gough platforms of conformal degree 28 is very interesting: By considering normal projections in all directions, they authors associate to a given sixtuple of base points a curve \(D\) in the modoli space \(M_6\) of sixtuples of points in the plane modulo Möbius transformations. The existence of Möbius equivalent projections of base and platform points is known to be crucial for the existence of self-motions. The curve \(D\) lies in the complete intersection \(Y\) of \(M_6\) with two quadric hypersurfaces. A conjecture, supported by vast numerical evidence, states that this construction can be inverted for the residual intersection \(D'\) (defined by \(Y = D \cup D'\)) and then gives rise to a suitable tuple of platform points and a unique self motion. Stewart Gough platforms obtained in this way are called ``Liasion linkages'' and the authors conjecture that the family family of Liasion linkages is a maximal component of the variety of all Stewart Gough platforms with self motion. For special cases, existence of Liasion linkages can be proved.