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Inverse kinematics of spherical wrist robot arms: Analysis and simulation

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Abstract

The spherical wrist robot arm is the most common type of industrial robot. This paper presents an efficient analytical computation procedure of its inverse kinematics. It is based on the decomposition of the inverse kinematic problem to two less complex problems; one concerns the robot arm basic structure and the other concerns its hand. The proposed computation procedure is used to obtain the inverse kinematic position models of two robot arms: one contains only revolute joints and the other contains both revolute and prismatic joints. The 1st and 2nd time derivatives of the obtained models give more accurate inverse kinematic velocity and acceleration models than numerical differentiation. These models are verified by simulation for two different trajectories. The obtained results demonstrate the effect of the proposed procedure on reducing the necessary computation time compared to other computation techniques.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mechanical Design & Production Department, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt

    Said M. Megahed

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  1. Said M. Megahed
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Megahed, S.M. Inverse kinematics of spherical wrist robot arms: Analysis and simulation. J Intell Robot Syst 5, 211–227 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00247418

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00247418

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