Freeing the Serial Mechanism Designer from Inverse Kinematic Solvability Constraints

Abstract

This paper presents a fast numerical solution for the inverse kinematics of a serial manipulator. The method is implemented on the C‐arm, a manipulator designed for use in robotic surgery. The inverse kinematics solution provides all possible solutions for any six degree‐of‐freedom serial manipulator, assuming that the forward kinematics are known and that it is possible to solve for the remaining joint angles if one joint angle’s value is known. With a fast numerical method and the current levels of computing power, designing a manipulator with closed‐form inverse kinematics is no longer necessary. When designing the C‐arm, we therefore chose to weigh other factors, such as actuator size and patient safety, more heavily than the ability to find a closed‐form inverse kinematics solution.

Online Free Anatomy Registration via Noncontact Skeletal Tracking for Collaborative Human/Robot Interaction in Surgical Robotics1

“…The robot used was a CORVUS arm (complete operating room robotics for virtually unassisted surgery), a custom built six degree of freedom robotic arm with a PRRRRR setup (a prismatic joint followed by five revolute joints in series), however, for this experiment only three degrees of freedom were required, as only position was being controlled, so only the first three consecutive revolute joints were used. The arm is a testbed for surgical robotics research; its hardware design is provided elsewhere [4].…”

Design, modelling and characterization of a 2-DOF precision positioning platform

“…There are two kinds of configurations for the 2-degree-offreedom (DOF) positioning platform, namely a serial mechanism (Friedman et al, 2010) and a parallel mechanism (Li and Xu, 2012;Xu, 2014). The design of the serial platform is straightforward; however, its positioning error will accumulate, thus affecting the motion accuracy of the platform.…”