An Analysis of Inverse Kinematics and Singular Configuration for Six Axes Robot with Wrist Offset (ICEIC'04)

The inverse kinematics problem is to find a set of joint variable values that will place the end effector of a robot manipulator into a given pose. Pieper has shown that a sufficient condition for a manipulator to have a closed form solution is that three adjacent joint axes intersects, hence the six axes robot with spherical wrist allows closed form solution. But many industrial robots have a non-spherical wrist to provide a stronger wrist configuration so that they can handle heavy payloads. Also, the use of a non-spherical wrist can result in a cheap and simple wrist arrangement than when all three axes intersect at a common point. In these cases, closed form solutions cannot be found. Therefore numerical technique must be used to solve the inverse kinematics equations. This paper proposes a new algorithm that can be used for finding inverse kinematics solution of the six axes robot with non-spherical wrist. Computer simulations are provided to prove the usefulness of our method.