An adaptation of FABRIK algorithm for serial robot’s inverse kinematics

Abstract

Forward And Backward Reaching Inverse Kinematics (FABRIK) is an avant-garde heuristic method characterized by its simplicity and speed of convergence, mainly used in the field of computer graphics that provides a solution to the inverse kinematics (IK) for kinematic chains, formed mainly by spherical joints. However, FABRIK still has limitations for applications in robotics because robots generally use one-dimensional joints. For this reason, this paper develops a method to solve the IK of manipulator robots based on FABRIK, taking into account the hinge, pivot and prismatic joints that make up the robot's kinematic chain, while keeping the joint values within their limits. Thus, the resulting method turned out to solve the IK of a hypothetical serial redundant manipulator of 10 degrees of freedom (DOF) using much fewer iterations and expending less time of execution to get the smallest root-mean-square error (RMSE) between the end-effector and the target in comparison with the Damped Least Squares (DLS) method.