Solution for Ill-Posed Inverse Kinematics of Robot Arm by Network Inversion

In the context of controlling a robot arm with multiple joints, the method of estimating the joint angles from the given end-effector coordinates is called inverse kinematics, which is a type of inverse problems. Network inversion has been proposed as a method for solving inverse problems by using a multilayer neural network. In this paper, network inversion is introduced as a method to solve the inverse kinematics problem of a robot arm with multiple joints, where the joint angles are estimated from the given end-effector coordinates. In general, inverse problems are affected by ill-posedness, which implies that the existence, uniqueness, and stability of their solutions are not guaranteed. In this paper, we show the effectiveness of applying network inversion with regularization, by which ill-posedness can be reduced, to the ill-posed inverse kinematics of an actual robot arm with multiple joints.