Abstract: By making full use of the property that it is easy to obtain the inverse kinematics of the Stewart parallel manipulator, the forward kinematics of the Stewart parallel manipulator is transformed into an optimal problem, and a real coded genetic-based forward kinematics method for the general Stewart parallel manipulator is proposed in this paper. The feasibility of the genetic based forward kinematics method is illustrated with the Stewart fine tuning platform for he next generation large radio telescopes. The high accuracy of the forward kinematics is obtained, which has overcome the shortcoming that the accuracy of the forward kinematics is susceptible to the initial guess values with the conventional numerical methods.

Key words: parallel manipulator, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, genetic algorithm