On the positioning of revolute-joint robot manipulators

Abstract

A new technique is introduced for obtaining the sets of joint-motor-displacements which correspond to a desired spatial pose at the end-effector of a revolute-joint manipulator. The properties of rotation are exploited and a new local coordinate notation is introduced to obtain the required solution. The proposed technique leads to two simplified sets of linear equations which correspond to the kinematic behavior of both the arm and the wrist. These two sets of equations have been manipulated further to obtain polynomial solutions for both manipulator structures. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.