Position control of a four link hyper redundant robotic manipulator

Hyper-Redundant robotic manipulators like Serial robots, Snake robots, Tentacle robots or Continuum robots have very large number of degrees of kinematics redundancy. Position control of such a robotic manipulator comprising of more than three links and articulated joints is a big challenge due to the involvement of large number of trigonometric terms in its inverse kinematics equations. In this paper, a simple algorithm for the inverse kinematics solution (IKS) of a four-link serial robotic manipulator has been proposed, which is then validated experimentally. The proposed method divides the robot into two two-link virtual sub-robot and solves the inverse kinematics analytically for joint variables of each sub-robot successively. A validation experiment was conducted on a 4-link prototype to check the validity of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results showed satisfactory results with good repeatability