A Systematic Approach to Learning Robot Programming with ROS

CHAPTER 12

Robot Arm Kinematics

CONTENTS

12.1 Forward kinematics

12.2 Inverse kinematics

12.3 Wrap-Up

INTRODUCTION

Robot arm kinematics is a starting point for most textbooks in robotics. A fundamental question is, given a set of joint displacements, where is the end effector in space? To be explicit, one must define reference frames. A frame of interest on a robot may be its tool flange, or some point on a tool tip (e.g. welder, laser, glue dispenser, grinder, ...) or a frame defined with respect to a gripper. It is useful to compute the pose of the defined frame of interest with respect to the robot’s base frame. In a separate transform, one can express the robot’s base frame with respect to a defined world frame. The task of computing the ...