A comparison study of three screw theory based kinematic solution methods for the industrial robot manipulators

Abstract

This paper compares three inverse kinematic formulation methods for industrial robot manipulators. All formulation methods are based on screw theory. Screw theory is an effective way to establish a global description of rigid body and avoids singularities due to the use of the local coordinates. In these three formulation methods, two of them use quaternion algebra and the other one uses matrix algebra. Compared with the matrix algebra, the quaternion algebra is more computationally efficient and it needs less storage area. Paden-Kahan sub problems are used to derive inverse kinematic solutions. 6-DOF industrial robot manipulator's forward and inverse kinematic equations are derived using these formulation methods and simulation results are given.