Abstract: A new method, which analyzes dynamics of the Stewart platform manipulator using velocity transformation is proposed. According to the inverse kinematics characteristics of Stewart platform, the analytical relationship between independent and dependent velocities can be derived directly in this method. The constraint Jacobian matrix is not necessary, nor the complicated matrix decomposition, thus leading to a significantly reduced numerical effort. Moreover, our approach avoids numerical unstable problems caused by matrix decomposition in traditional coordinate reduction. The analysis demonstrates that this method is highly computational efficient and is very suitable for parallel computation. The method can be easily extended to other types of parallel manipulators.

Key words: Coordinate reduction, Dynamics, Manipulator, Stewart platform, Velocity transformation