Search Results for: manipulator arm

We introduce serial-link robot manipulators, the sort of robot arms you might have seen working in factories doing tasks like welding, spray painting or material transfer. We will learn how we can compute the pose of the robot’s end-effector given knowledge of the robot’s joint angles and the dimensions of its links.

We summarise the important points from this masterclass.

We consider the most general type of serial-link robot manipulator which has six joints and can position and orient its end-effector in 3D space.

We consider the simplest possible robot, which has one rotary joint and an arm.

We consider a robot with four joints that moves its end-effector in 3D space.

We start by looking at a number of different types of robot arm with particular focus on serial-link robot manipulators.

In a serial-link manipulator arm each joint has to support all the links between itself and the end of the robot. We introduce the recursive Newton-Euler algorithm which allows us to compute the joint torques given the robot joint positions, velocities and accelerations and the link inertial parameters.

The orientation of a body in 3D can also be described by two vectors, often called the approach and orientation vectors.

We consider a robot, which has two rotary joints and an arm.

A characteristic of inverse kinematics is that there is often more than one solution, that is, more than one set of joint angles gives exactly the same end-effector pose.