Research on kinematic structure of a redundant serial industrial robot arm

Abstract

This paper proposes a new kinematic structure of a redundant serial robot arm and presents forward and inverse kinematic analysis. This is a new structure developed based on the robot IRB 2400 of ABB. The new structure consists of six revolute joints and two prismatic joints. The proposed robot arm has only seven degrees of freedom because the structure has a constraint between two revolute joints. Two prismatic joints help to expand workspaces of manipulator from small to very large. The paper describes in details about forward and inverse kinematics. Forward kinematics is derived based on DH Convention while inverse kinematics is calculated based on an objective function to minimize motions of a revolute joint and two prismatic joints. The simulation results on Matlab software indicated that the joint positions and velocities of a redundant serial robot arm matched well the trajectories in Cartesian Space.