Quaternion Based Kinematic Analysis for Industrial Robot Manipulators

ABSTRACT Formulating the suitable mathematical models and deriving the efficient algorithms for a robot kinematics mechanism are very crucial for analyzing the behavior of industrial robot manipulators. Direct kinematics that determines the Cartesian position and orientation of the end-effector for the specified values of joint parameters is generally performed using homogenous transforms. In this paper, quaternion-vector pairs are used as an alternative method for driving the direct kinematics of industrial robot manipulators equipped with Euler wrist to have 6-DOF robot manipulators. The successive screw displacements in this method provide a very compact formulation for the kinematic equations and also reduce the number of equations obtained in each goal position, according to the matrix counterparts. The kinematics model of CC cylindrical robot manipulator is given as example for illustrating the compactness of the method.