Kinematic analysis and workspace determination of a 6 dof ckcm robot end-effector

Abstract

This paper presents the analysis of a 6 DOF robot end-effector built to study telerobotic assembly of NASA hardwares in space. Since the end-effector is required to perform high precision motion in a limited workspace, closed-kinematic chain mechanism is chosen for its design. A closed-form solution is obtained for the inverse kinematic problem and an iterative procedure employing Newton-Raphson method is proposed to solve the forward kinematic problem. A study of the end-effector workspace results in a general procedure for the workspace determination based on the link constraints. Computer simulation results are presented.