Inverse Kinematics for a Barn-Door Equatorial Platform

Abstract

In this paper, a robotic platform is designed to allow a telescope mounted on this platform to track stars. To avoid the use of conic sections, a 3-degree of freedom robotic platform is proposed. With this design, however, the solution to the inverse kinematics problem defines the plane of the platform - not the location of specific points on the robotic platform as is traditionally done with inverse kinematics. Once the inverse-kinematics problem is solved, the equatorial platform is built, tested, and shown to track Jupiter over a span of two minutes.