A NAO robot playing tic-tac-toe: Comparing alternative methods for Inverse Kinematics

Abstract

In this paper, two alternative methods to the Inverse Kinematics problem are compared to traditional methods regarding computation time, accuracy, and convergence rate. The test domain is the arm of the NAO humanoid robot. The results show that FABRIK, a heuristic iterative approximation algorithm outperforms the two traditional methods, which are both based on the Jacobian inverse technique, on all aspects. An artificial neural network vastly outperforms all algorithms regarding computation time, but lacks accuracy. To demonstrate the practical applicability, FABRIK has been used enable a NAO humanoid robot to play tic-tac-toe.