Abstract: Portable articulated coordinate measuring machine (PACMM) is a kind of high accuracy coordinate measurement instrument and it has been widely applied in manufacturing and assembly. A number of key problems should be taken into consideration to achieve the required accuracy, such as structural design, mathematical measurement model and calibration method. Although the classical kinematic model of PACMM is the Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) model, the representation of D-H encounters the badly-conditioned problem when the consecutive joint axes are parallel or nearly parallel. In this paper, a new kinematic model of PACMM based on a generalized geometric error model which eliminates the inadequacies of D-H model has been proposed. Furthermore, the generalized geometric error parameters of PACMM are optimized by the Levenberg-Marquard (L-M) algorithm. The experimental result demonstrates that the measurement of standard deviation of PACMM based on the generalized geometric error model has been reduced from 0.0627 mm to 0.0452 mm with respect to the D-H model.