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Inverse Kinematics

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Robotics

  • 61 Accesses

Synonyms

Backward kinematics; Kinematic analysis

Definition

Inverse kinematics refers to the calculation of joint parameters in a robotic system that achieve a specified configuration of the robot. This calculation is the solution of the kinematics equations of the system and is not strictly an inverse. However, in the rapidly evolving early days of industrial robot arms, the term inverse kinematics came to represent this calculation and remains to this day. With advances in more complicated robotic systems, such as parallel and metamorphic robots, the interpretation of the term inverse can be misleading.

Overview

With the development of the first commercial industrial robot arms by Devol (1961), Engleberger (1980), Victor Scheinman (Scheinman and McCarthy, 2008), and others (Paul, 1981; Craig, 2018; Lynch and Park, 2017), an important concern was determining the location of the robot’s end-effector, or hand, in the robot’s physical workspace for a given set of joint angles. This is...

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, SD, USA

    Pierre Larochelle

  2. University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    J. Michael McCarthy

Authors
  1. Pierre Larochelle
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  2. J. Michael McCarthy
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pierre Larochelle .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Marcelo H. Ang

  2. Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Oussama Khatib

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy

    Bruno Siciliano

Section Editor information

  1. University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    J. Michael McCarthy

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Larochelle, P., McCarthy, J.M. (2023). Inverse Kinematics. In: Ang, M.H., Khatib, O., Siciliano, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Robotics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41610-1_122-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41610-1_122-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41610-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41610-1

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