Coordinates, Conversions, and Kinematics for the Rochester Robotics Lab

Abstract

This is a guide to coordinate systems, representations, and geometric relationships between them, for components of the Rochester Robotics Laboratory. The main entities at issue are the joint angles, location variables, and coordinate systems of the Puma, the camera angles and coordinate systems associated with the head, the spatial location of three-dimensional points, and the kinematic and inverse kinematic relationships between them. The robot-to-camera kinematic chain is described, conversions between homogeneous transformations and VAL location descriptions are provided, and inverse problems (camera angles to aim cameras at a 3-D point given a robot configuration, binocular stereo calculations) are solved. Constants describing the robot head and sample robot description data structures are provided.