# Kinematically Redundant Octahedral Motion Platform for Virtual Reality Simulations

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel kinematically redundant octahedral motion platform designed for virtual reality, enhancing immersion by providing feedback through an omni-directional treadmill, with detailed analysis of its kinematics and singularities.

## Contribution

It presents a modified octahedral manipulator with one degree of redundancy and analyzes its kinematic behavior and singularities for VR applications.

## Key findings

- Identified and characterized unavoidable singularities.
- Demonstrated improved VR immersion capabilities.
- Analyzed the mechanism's kinematic redundancy and reconfigurability.

## Abstract

We propose a novel design of a parallel manipulator of Stewart Gough type for virtual reality application of single individuals; i.e. an omni-directional treadmill is mounted on the motion platform in order to improve VR immersion by giving feedback to the human body. For this purpose we modify the well-known octahedral manipulator in a way that it has one degree of kinematical redundancy; namely an equiform reconfigurability of the base. The instantaneous kinematics and singularities of this mechanism are studied, where especially "unavoidable singularities" are characterized. These are poses of the motion platform, which can only be realized by singular configurations of the mechanism despite its kinematic redundancy.