Joint Constrained Differential Inverse Kinematics Algorithm for Serial Manipulators

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for avoiding joint limits of robot manipulators in the solution of the differential inverse kinematics problem. A nonlinear transformation is applied to the joint limits, leading to a new kinematics formulation defined in the space of the transformed variables. The introduced transformation ensures that the joint variables stay between joint limits. Optimality conditions are converted into the transformed joint space, and closed-loop differential inverse kinematics is applied. The effectiveness of the introduced method is demonstrated on a simulational example.