The unified orthogonal architecture of industrial serial manipulators

The well-known inverse kinematics problem of six-degree-of-freedom serial manipulators has been solved with several approaches, but no attention has been given to provide an explicit solution involving the generality of industrial manipulators architecture. With the aim of embracing a large spectrum of industrial manipulators in a unified platform, an anthropomorphic classification is introduced. This classification considers sixteen different architectures, whose inverse kinematics is solved with a single approach, due to the geometric derivation introduced here as well. It is remarked that with this derivation, the user has the control of the eight possible solutions for a given pose, as they are identified by three Boolean variables defined in the pseudo-code presented. To emphasize this feature, an example is given to show the advantage of being able to visualize alternative configurations. A complementary formulation is introduced to solve the inverse kinematics of five-degree-of-freedom manipulators. Furthermore, it is presented a case study in which a survey of industrial manipulators is tagged according to the classification defined here. & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.