Automated inverse-kinematics for robot off-line programming

Abstract

Automated methods are developed to classify a robot's kinematic type and select an appropriate library inverse-kinematic solution based on this classification. These methods automatically generate DenavitHartenberg joint frame parameters, given any frame representation that can mathematically be represented as a homogeneous transformation. To reduce the number of closed-form inverse-kinematics solutions required for a broad class of serial robots, additional methods account for differences in robot zero state, base frame location, and joint polarity. Further generalization results from using joint frame decoupling to map lower degree-of-freedom robots into the inverse-kinematics solutions of higher degree-offreedom robots.