Kinematic analysis of a cable-driven 7-DOF robotic arm based on tensegrity joints

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a cable-driven 7-DOF robotic arm based on tensegrity joints and derive its inverse kinematics. The inverse kinematics of this robotic arm can be determined with two steps. Firstly, by given the position and posture of the end of robotic arm, we represent the angle of the ideal joints with the arm angle. Secondly, with the help of the homogeneous transformation matrix and the closed-vector relationship, the active cables length of each joint which is the inverse kinematic solution are calculated. Simulations and experiments are conducted to verify the validity of the proposed inverse kinematics method.