Kinematic Calibration for the 3-UPS/S Shipborne Stabilized Platform Based on Transfer Learning

The three-degrees-of-freedom (3-DOF) parallel robot is commonly employed as a shipborne stabilized platform for real-time compensation of ship disturbances. Pose accuracy is one of its most critical performance indicators. Currently, neural networks have been applied to the kinematic calibration of stabilized platforms to compensate for pose errors and enhance motion accuracy. However, collecting a large amount of measured configuration data for robots entails high costs and time, which restricts the widespread use of neural networks. In this study, a “transfer network” is established by combining fine-tuning with a Back Propagation (BP) neural network. This network takes the motion transmission characteristics inherent in the ideal kinematic model as prior knowledge and transfers them to a network trained based on the actual poses. Compared with the conventional BP neural network trained by actual poses alone, the transfer network shows significant performance advantages, effectively solving the problems of low prediction accuracy and weak generalization ability in the case of small-sample measured data. Considering this, the impact pattern of the sample number of the actual pose on the effectiveness of transfer learning is revealed through the construction of multiple transfer network models under varying sample numbers of the actual pose, providing valuable marine engineering guidance. Finally, simulated sea-service experiments were conducted on the 3-UPS/S shipborne stabilized platform to validate the correctness and superiority of the proposed method.