A comparative study of three inverse kinematic methods of serial industrial robot manipulators in the screw theory framework

In this paper, we compare three inverse kinematic formulation methods for the serial industrial robot manipulators. All formulation methods are based on screw theory. Screw theory is an effective way to establish a global description of rigid body and avoids singularities due to the use of the local coordinates. In these three formulation methods, the first one is based on quaternion algebra, the second one is based on dualquaternions, and the last one that is called exponential mapping method is based on matrix algebra. Compared with the matrix algebra, quaternion algebra based solutions are more computationally efficient and they need less storage area. The method which is based on dual-quaternion gives the most compact and computationally efficient solution. Paden-Kahan subproblems are used to derive inverse kinematic solutions. 6-DOF industrial robot manipulator's forward and inverse kinematic equations are derived using these formulation methods. Simulation and experimental results are given.