This paper presents a parallel wire mechanism for measuring a robot pose of 6 degrees of freedom (DOF), The position and orientation of a robot end-effector are obtained from the six wire lengths measured in the parallel wire mechanism. The forward kinematics is solved by using a numerical method, and determined the unique solution based on the geometric configuration of the mechanism. The method to estimate the workspace is represented. It is verified that the proposed mechanism can measure 6-DOF of industrial robot effectively. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.