Identification of principal screws of two- and three-screw systems

Abstract

The current paper proposes a unified analytical methodology to identify the principal screws of two- and three-screw systems. Based on the definition of the pitch of a screw, it first obtains an identical homogeneous quadric equation. According to functional analysis theory, it is known that the partial derivatives of an identical quadric equation with respect to its variables must be zero. Therefore, the paper deduces a set of linear homogeneous equations that are made up of the partial derivatives of the quadric equation. With the existing criteria of non-zero solutions for homogeneous linear algebra equations, it ultimately obtains the formulas of the principal pitches and the associated principal screws of the system. The most outstanding contribution of this methodology is that it proposes a unified analytical approach to identify the principal pitches and the principal coordinate systems of the second-order and the third-order screw systems. This should be a new contribution to the screw theory and will boost its applications to the kinematics analysis of robots and spatial mechanisms.