A geometric method for determining joint rotations in the inverse kinematics of robotic manipulators

Abstract

An inverse-kinematics algorithm has been developed to evaluate the joint rotations of a robotic manipulator given the orientation of its hand link. The method mimics the way a person would determine the joint rotations by assembling the links comprising the robot mechanism and making adjustments in the joint displacements until the hand link is in the desired situation. An example is given where it is shown that the method is reasonably robust, can be applied to any design of robot, and is competitive with alternative highly-mathematical, specific-robot specialized, computational-intensive schemes. ©2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.