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Springer Handbook of Robotics pp 9–33Cite as

Kinematics

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Abstract

Kinematics pertains to the motion of bodies in a robotic mechanism without regard to the forces/torques that cause the motion. Since robotic mechanisms are by their very essence designed for motion, kinematics is the most fundamental aspect of robot design, analysis, control, and simulation. The robotics community has focused on efficiently applying different representations of position and orientation and their derivatives with respect to time to solve foundational kinematics problems.

This chapter will present the most useful representations of the position and orientation of a body in space, the kinematics of the joints most commonly found in robotic mechanisms, and a convenient convention for representing the geometry of robotic mechanisms. These representational tools will be applied to compute the workspace, the forward and inverse kinematics, the forward and inverse instantaneous kinematics, and the static wrench transmission of a robotic mechanism. For brevity, the focus will be on algorithms applicable to open-chain mechanisms.

The goal of this chapter is to provide the reader with general tools in tabulated form and a broader overview of algorithms that can be applied together to solve kinematics problems pertaining to a particular robotic mechanism.

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Abbreviations

DOF:

degree of freedom

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Terman Engineering Center 521, 94305-4021, Stanford, CA, USA

    Kenneth Waldron Prof

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Ohio State University, E307 Scott Laboratory, 201 West 19th Ave, 43210, Columbus, OH, USA

    James Schmiedeler Prof

Authors
  1. Kenneth Waldron Prof
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  2. James Schmiedeler Prof
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Kenneth Waldron Prof or James Schmiedeler Prof .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. PRISMA Lab, Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universitá degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, 80125, Napoli, Italy, Via Claudio 21

    Bruno Siciliano Prof.

  2. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, 94305-9010, Stanford, CA, USA

    Oussama Khatib Prof.

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag

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Waldron, K., Schmiedeler, J. (2008). Kinematics. In: Siciliano, B., Khatib, O. (eds) Springer Handbook of Robotics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30301-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30301-5_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23957-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-30301-5

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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