Unmanned vehicle has attracted wide attention and interests throughout the world since it first deputed in the 1960s. However, the experimental methods for unmanned vehicle's intelligent behavior, such as semi-physical simulation and motion subsystem, have not been widely explored. First, the requirements of the motion subsystem in unmanned vehicle semi-physical facility are analyzed, and a six DOF parallel manipulator is selected to reproduce the pose of the vehicle. The link lengths of the motion subsystem are worked out under the given rotational angles of the vehicle. According to the geometric properties of tetrahedron, three joint positions of the top platform are determined, and the rest are obtained from the first three position vectors. Six constraint equations are set up based on the vertices on the top platform and the link lengths. In order to solve the six angle variables, a numerical algorithm built on the Newton-Raphson iterative method is presented, which is based on Taylor series expansion of six constraint equations. The pose of the top platform is ultimately calculated. The eigenvalues of the top platform are solved to obtain the natural frequencies of the motion subsystem. The coordinates of six joint centers on the top platform and six constraint equations can be realized by simple algebraic manipulation, which allows significant abbreviation in the formulation and provides a systematic way of obtaining the kinematic solution of the parallel manipulator. A numerical example is given and its efficacy is demonstrated by the inverse kinematics. The computation strategy based on tetrahedron method and Newton-Raphson iterative method provide a simple and cost-effective method for solving forward kinematics of six DOF parallel manipulators, and this method sheds light on other parallel manipulators.
