A computational technique for solving robot end-effector trajectories into joint trajectories

A typical robot task is specified as a trajectory assigned to the end-effector. The solution must be a joint trajectory, which constitutes the reference input to the joint control servos. An approach is presented that is applicable to any robot structure with a kinematic equation and Jacobian that are known. The idea is to reformulate the inverse kinematic problem as a tracking problem for a simple dynamic system. As an example, the proposed inverse kinematic algorithm is applied to the first three degrees of freedom of a PUMA robot