1、英文原文THE STRUCTURE DESIGN AND KINEMATICS OF A ROBOTMANIPULATORml. THEORYKESHENG WANG and TERJE K . LIENProduction Engineering Laboratory, NTH-SINTEF, N-7034 Trondheim, NorwayA robot manipulator with six degrees of freedom can be separated into two parts: the arm with the first three joints for major
2、positioning and the wrist with the last three joints for major orienting. If we consider theconsecutive links to be parallel or perpendicular, only 12 arm and two wrist configurations are potentially usefuland different for robot manipulator mechanical design. This kind of simplification can lead to
3、 a generalalgorithm of inverse kinematics for the corresponding configuration of different combinations of arm and wrist.The approaches for calculating the inverse kinematics of a robot manipulator are very efficient and easy.The approaches for calculating the inverse kinematics of a robot manipulat
4、or are very efficient and easy.1. INTROUCTIONA robot manipulator consists of a number of linksconnected together by joints. In robot manipulatordesign, the selection of the kinematic chain of therobot manipulator is one of the most importantdecisions in the mechanical and controller designprocess.In
5、 order to position and orient the end effector ofthe robot manipulator arbitrarily, six degrees offreedom are required: three degrees of freedom forposition and three degrees of freedom for orient-ation. Each manipulator joint can provide onedegree of freedom, and thus a manipulator musthave a minim
6、um of six joints if it is to provide sixorthogonal degrees of freedom in position andorientation.The construction of manipulators depends on thedifferent combination of joints. The number of poss-ible variations of an industrial robot structure can bedetermined as follows:V =6where V= number of vari
7、ations.D F = n u m b e r of degrees of freedomThese considerations show that a very largenumber of different chains can be built, for examplesix axis 46,656 chains are possible. 6 However, alarge number is not appropriate for kinematicreasons.We may divide the six degrees of freedom of arobot manipu
8、lator into two parts: the arm whichconsists of the first three joints and related links; andthe wrist which consists of the last three joints andrelated links. Then the variations of kinematic chainswill be tremendously reduced. Lien has developedthe constructions of arm and wrist, i.e. 20 different
9、constructions for the arm and eight for the wrist.2In this paper, we abbreviate the 20 different armsinto 12 kinds of arms which are useful and different.We conclude that five kinds of arms and two kinds ofwrists are basic constructions for commercial indus-trial robot manipulators. This kind of sim
10、plificationmay lead to a general algorithm of inverse kinema-tics for the corresponding configuration of differentcombinations of arm and wrist. 2.STRUCTURE DESIGN OF ROBOT MANIPULATORSIn this paper, for optimum workspace and sim-plicity, we assume that:(a) A robot with six degrees of freedom may be
11、separated into two parts: the linkage consistingof the first three joints and related links is calledthe arm; the linkage of the remaining joints andrelated links is called the wrist.(b) Two links are connected by a lower pair joint.Only revolute and linear joints are used in robotmanipulators.(c) T
12、he axes of joints are either perpendicular orAccording to the authors knowledge, thisassumption is suitable for most commercially usedindustrial robot manipulators. We can consider thestructure of arm and wrist separately.2.1. The structure o f the arm o f robot manipulator(a) Graphical representati
13、on. To draw a robot inside view or in perspective is complicated and doesnot give a clear picture of how the various segmentsmove in relation to each other. To draw a robot in aplane sketched diagram is too simple and does notgive a clear construction picture. We compromisethis problem in a simple t
14、hree-dimensional diagramto express the construction and movements of arobot manipulator. A typical form of representationfor different articulations is shown in Table 1.(b) Combination of joints. We use R to representa revolute joint and L to represent a linear joint.Different combinations of joints
15、 can be obtained asfollows:According to the different combinations with theparallel or perpendicular axes, each previous combin-ation has four kinds of sub-combination. Thus, 32combinations can be arrived at: If the second joint is a linear joint and both the otherjoints are perpendicular to it, two
16、 choices in relationto the first and the third joints are considered paral-lel or perpendicular.In all, there are 36 possible combinations of a simplethree-joint arm.Nine of 36 possible combinations degenerate intoone or two degrees of freedom.Seven of the remainder are planar mechanisms.Thus, there
17、 are 20 possible spatial simple arms.Let us consider R1 1 L2 I L3 in whichthe first joint permits rotation about the vertical axis,the second joint is a vertical linear joint (i.e. parallelto the first), and the third joint is a horizontal linearjoint (i.e. perpendicular to the second). This armdefi
18、nes a typical cylindrical robot. Changing thesequential order of the joints so that either (a) thevertical linear joint precedes the rotary joint, or (b)the vertical linear joint follows the horizontal one,will result in no change in the motion of the arm. Inthis case there are two linkages which ar
19、e bothequivalent to the standard cylindrical linkage. Inall such cases where two or more equivalent linkagesexist, the representative of the group will be the onein which the linear joint that is parallel to a rotaryjoint is in the middle (joint No. 2). Counting onlyone linkage to represent the grou
20、p of equivalentswill eliminate eight of the 20 combinations. Theremaining 12 categories of links are useful and dif-ferent shown in Fig. 1. We get the same results as inRef. 4.(c) Five basic types o f manipulator arm. Althoughthere are 12 useful and different arm-configurationswhich can be used in t
21、he design of a robot man-ipulator arm, in practice only some of them arepractical and commonly used. We find that mostcommercially available industrial robots can bebroken down into only five groups according to the.characteristics of their arm motion and geometricalappearance.The five groups can be
22、 defined as follows and areshown in Fig. 6.1. Cartesian ( L I L I L)2. Cylindrical (R II L 1 L)3. Spherical (R I R I L)4. Revolute (R I RII R)5. Double cylindrical ( LII R II R).2.2. The structure o f a manipulator wrist(a) Joint type. We have used the first three joints,i.e. the arm of the robot ma
23、nipulator, to completethe major task of positioning. Then we use the lastthree joints to provide the three degrees of freedomof orientation and refer to the related linkages as thewrist.The wrist of a complete manipulator must containthree revolute joints, since the orientation of a rigidbody has th
24、ree degrees of freedom, for example firstrotation about the X axis, then rotation about the yaxis, and finally rotation about the z axis.(b) Combination or joints and links. Because theorientation of a wrist which only has three rotationaljoints is simplest, its combination is much simpFrom the comb
25、ination R R R , we know that onlyone of the four configurations can be used for com-pleting the orientation of robot wrist. R II R II R is aplanar mechanism. R 1 R II R and R II R 1 R cannotexpress three degrees of freedom in the orientationof the robot wrist. So only the R 1 R 1 R construc-tion can
26、 be used to complete the orientation task.If we have a different sequence of x, y, z axes, ofcourse we can get many kinds of wrist configuration.But many of them are equivalent. We only con-sider the relationship between the first and the thirdjoint: parallel and perpendicular. Two differentcombinat
27、ions can be arrived at, i.e. the Euler angleand r o l l - p i t c h - y a w angle expressions that are shownin Fig. 2. The sequence of x, y, z axes does, however,have an influence on the complexity of the inversekinematic solution.2.3. Typical robot manipulator structure We can use five categories o
28、f arm configurationand two kinds of wrist configuration to combine 10different kinds of robot manipulators with the sixdegrees of freedom which exist in industrial practice.Of course, we can also consider the other seven outof 12 arm categories with one out of two wristcategories to build a new robo
29、t manipulator. Butmost of them have not appeared in industrial prac-tice yet.3. SOLUTION FOR INVERSE KINEMATICS OF ROBOT MANIPULATOR3.1. General principlesTo find the inverse kinematic equations of a robotmanipulator at first appears to be a difficult task. Butwhen the manipulator is separated into
30、two parts, itbecomes relatively simple.The relationship between the position and orien-tation of manipulator links connected together byrotational joints shown in Fig. 3, can be described byWhere0i is the ith joint variable;di is the ith joint offset;ai is the ith link length; andai is the ith link
31、twist angle.The position and orientation of the end effector ofthe robot manipulator T is the matrices product. 3,T = A I A 2 A 3 A 4 A s A 6 . (2)By the associative law the product of matrices can beregrouped into two subsets which represent the armand wrist respectivelyWhereAndThe superscripts des
32、ignate the reference frame; arepresents the tip of the arm; and w represents thetip of wrist, i.e. the center of the end effector of themanipulator.T given for the end effector can be written as a4 x 4 homogeneous matrix composed of a orienta-tion submatrix R and a position vector p5.6We can obtain
33、the vector OaPdirectly using a vectoranalysis method. The detail will be mentioned in thenext section.from Eq. (4),We can get 01, 02, 03, the first three joint variablesfrom the solution of the following equation:The orientation of the end effector of the robotmanipulator can be considered as the pr
34、oduct of theorientation of the arm and the orientation of the wrist: From Eqs (12) and (5), we can obtain where We can get the last three joint variables 04, 05, 06 by solving Eq. (13).3.2. Different methodsThere are two kinds of solutions for the robotmanipulator: closed form solutions and numerica
35、lsolutions. Because of their iterative nature, numeri-cal solutions are generally much slower than thecorresponding closed form solutions, so much so that for most uses, we are not interested in the numerical approach to solution of kinematics. But, in general, it is much easier to obtain the numeri
36、cal algorithmthan to obtain the closed form solution.In this paper we propose algorithms of both solu-tions.(a) Closed form solution. In the closed form solu-tion, the key problem is to obtain the position of thetip of the arm P. It is simple to obtain the position ofthe arm tip for the wrist axis i
37、ntersecting at onepoint. But it is complex for the wrists where there isan axis offset, because the movement of the wristwill greatly affect the position of end effector of themanipulatorIn the following, we use the RRR + Euler angleand RRR + R - P - Y angle as examples to describehow to get the pos
38、ition of the tip of arm separately. RRR + Euler angleFigure 4 shows a sketch diagram of a R R R + Euler angle robot manipulator (PUMA 600) and the co-ordinate system which is represented by the D - Hexpression. The figure shows the relationship be-tween the arm and wrist vectors. r, is the positionv
39、ector from the base coordinate frame to the centerof the end effector of the robot manipulator. Arepresents the approach direction of the end effec-tor, aPis the arm vector measured from the origin tothe connecting point of the arm and wrist, gP is thewrist vector having the same direction as the Av
40、ector and length measured from the connectionpoint of the arm and wrist to the center of the endeffector.With reference to frame 0, the product R gP issimply gP, i.e. the position of the center of the endeffector of robot manipulator measured from the tipof the arm, all with respect to frame 0. We c
41、anobtainThis states that the total translation of the endeffector is the sum of the translation from the base tothe tip of the arm plus the transformation from thetip of the arm to the center of the end effector.From Eq. (17), we can easily obtain the positionof the arm tip P as follows:Then we can
42、use Eqs (10) and (11) to obtain the firstthree joint variables 0:, 02, 03 and Eq. (13) to obtainthe last three joint variables 04, 05,06. The detailedsolution is shown in Part II. t0Figure 5 shows a sketch diagram of a RRR +R - P - Y angle robot manipulator (Cincinatti Mila-cran T 3) and the coordin
43、ate system. Euler anglesare different from R - P - Y angles because the vector0p is affected by the movement of joint 4. Here is anexample showing how to treat the wrist axis offset.gPt:is the wrist vector having the same direction asthe A vector and length measured from the point ofjoint 4 to the c
44、enter of the end effector, i.e. d+. P2 isthe other wrist vector having length measured frompoint of joint 4 to point of joint 5, i.e. a4. oP, theposition of arm, can be computed from the se-quential solution of the following set of equations:Then we can obtain 01, 02, 03 from Eqs (10) and (11)and ob
45、tain 0+, 05, 06 from Eq. (13). General closed form solution algorithmStep 1. Finding the approach vector of the endeffectorStep 2.If there is some off-set in the wrist construc-tion, use the vector algebra to determine theoff-set gP, and get the arm vector, i.e. theposition of arm tip, then go to st
46、ep 4.Otherwise go to Step 3. Compute the arm vector P directly usingapproach vector A.Step 4. Compute the first three joint variables 01,02, 03, using the arm vector gP from Eqs(10) and (11).Step 5. Compute the last three joint variables 04, 05,06 from Eq. (13).This approach shows that the number of
47、 computa-tions is kept to a minimum by reducing the overallproblem into separate steps which in turn lowers thelikelihood of errors and helps to reduce the tedious-ness of the work.(b) Numerical solution. The algorithm for thenumerical solution:Step 1. Assume the last three joint variables 04, 05,06
48、 by the best available approximation,perhaps from a previous computed point.Step 2. Compute the arm joint variables 81, 02, 03from Eqs (10) and (11).Step 3. Compute wrist joint variables 04, 05, 06 fromEq. (13), using the values of the arm jointvariables obtained from step 2.Step 4. Compute the position and orientation of theend effector of robot manipulator using thevalues of all joint variables obtained fromstep 2 and step 3.Step 5. If the errors between the given values andthe calculated values is less than a pre-specified value, then the procedure stops.Otherwise go to step 2 to repeat t
