Abstract: This paper presents two measurement methods based on 3-DOF serial and parallel mechanisms for the position and attitude measurement of planar movement and introduces the principles of these two methods in detail.Error model of the serial mechanism measurement method is built,mapping relationship between the geometric error sources and the initial measurement parameters is deduced,and their influence on terminal position and attitude errors is obtained.Then the accuracy analysis results of this method are given.The simulation results and the experimental data prove the validity of this method.Furthermore,the comparisons of these two measurement methods are given on some aspects including geometric error sources,measurement motion characteristics,etc.