The parallel kinematic machine (PKM), which is applied Exechon mechanism, is efficiently used for manufacturing industry due to its agile movement, flexibility and high rigidity. On-Machine measurement (OMM) in high-dof manufacturing machines such as the PKM and five-axis machine tools has importantly used for processed part measurement, coordinate system set and machine performance evaluation. In this study, measurement and compensation of touch probe offset, which occurs measurement error of the OMM, are carried out for the PKM. A dependent rotational motion is occurred due to kinematic constraint, and causes non-constant offset of a touch probe. The dependent rotational motion is calculated via inverse kinematics analysis. The probe offset is accurately measured using a master ring with considering the analyzed dependent rotational motion angle. In addition, measurement procedure to eliminate the offset induced measurement error is presented. To verify the proposed technique, circular tests using a master ring and commercial touch probe on the PKM were performed. Circularity measurement deviation of a master was reduced 65% without the PKM’s kinematic error calibration.

The out-of-squareness is one of the error sources that affect the positioning accuracy of machine tools and coordinate measuring machines. Laser interferometer is widely used to measure the position and angular errors, and can measure the squareness using an optical square. However, the squareness measurement using the laser interferometer is difficult, as compared to other errors due to complicated optics setup and Abbe’s error occurrence. The effect of out-of squareness mainly appears at the face-diagonal of the movable plane. The diagonal displacements are also affected by the position dependent geometric errors. In this study, the squareness estimation techniques via diagonal displacement measurement using the laser interferometer without an optical square were proposed. For accurate estimation and measurement time reduction, the errors selected from proposed discriminant were measured. Discrepancy between the proposed technique with the laser interferometer (with an optical square) result was 0.6 μrad.

This paper proposes a new model to compensate for errors of a five-axis machine tool. A matrix with error components, that is, an error matrix, is separated from the error synthesis model of a five-axis machine tool. Based on the kinematics and inversion of the error matrix which can be obtained not by using a numerical method, an error compensation model is established and used to calculate compensation values of joint variables. The proposed compensation model does not need numerical methods to find the compensation values from the error compensation model, which includes nonlinear equations. An experiment using a double ball-bar is implemented to verify the proposed model.