The Journal of Korea Robotics Society (로봇학회논문지)

Korea Robotics Society (한국로봇학회)
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A Universal Method for Constructing DH parameters from Unified Robot Description Format

URDF로부터 DH 파라미터를 구성하는 일반적인 방법

  • Received : 2022.11.16
  • Accepted : 2023.01.09
  • Published : 2023.02.28
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Abstract

This paper introduced how to construct Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) parameters from the Unified Robot Description Format (URDF). URDF is convenient for describing a robot even though the robot is very complex. On the other hand, DH convention is not an easy notation for many novices who want to describe a robot. Therefore, most vendors provide URDF and users prefer to use URDF to describe a robot. However, some controllers or algorithms are based on DH parameters to perform kinematics, dynamics, control, etc. To connect URDF and DH parameters, we present a three-step approach to construct DH parameters from URDF. The first step is to define the joint axis for constructing DH parameters. The second step is constructing DH parameters to define joint character. The final step is constructing DH parameters to define the coordinate frame of the child link. This approach is based on intuitive vector calculation and guarantees the uniqueness of DH parameters. To verify our approach, we applied our approach to a simple one-link robot, a manipulator with 6 DOF, and a quadruped robot with 3 DOF per leg. We verified that our approach worked well based on forward kinematic results.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work (research) was supported by ITECH R&D program of MOTIE/KEIT. (Project No. 20014398 Development of a kinematically versatile, easy-to-use, safety-supported, AI-integrable, and high speed (>=5kHz) robot controller)

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