Abstract
Screw theory is a powerful mathematical tool for the analysis of spatial mechanisms. A screw consists of two three-dimensional vectors. A screw can be used to denote the position and orientation of a spatial vector, the linear velocity and angular velocity of a rigid body, or a force and a couple, respectively. Therefore, the concept of a screw is convenient in kinematics and dynamics, while the transformation between the screw-based method and vector and matrix methods is straightforward. When applied in mechanism analysis, screw theory has the advantages of clear geometrical concepts, explicit physical meaning, simple expression and convenient algebraic calculation. It is worth noting that the preliminary requirements for screw theory are only linear algebra and basic dynamics in undergraduate level. Thus, screw theory has been widely applied and researchers have used screw theory to make great contribution to many frontier problems in mechanism theory.
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Notes
- 1.
The content of screw theory in this book is based on the teaching material presented by Dr. Duffy at Florida University in 1982. At that time, the first author of this book listened attentively to the lectures and was deeply inspired by the course content. The author wishes to express here once again his acknowledgments to Dr. Duffy.
- 2.
For the convenience of readers, to distinguish between line vector and screw, the dual component of screw is expressed as S 0.
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Huang, Z., Li, Q., Ding, H. (2013). Basics of Screw Theory. In: Theory of Parallel Mechanisms. Mechanisms and Machine Science, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4201-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4201-7_1
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