The Parallel Solving Method of Robot Kinematic Equations Based on FPGA

In the implementation of robot motion control, complex kinematic computations consume too much central processing unit (CPU) time and affect the responsiveness of robot motion. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a parallel method for solving kinematic equations of articulated robots based on the coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) algorithm. The method completes the fast calculation of the transcendental function based on the CORDIC algorithm, adopts the tree structure method to optimize the key computational paths of forward and inverse solutions, and designs a parallel pipeline to realize the low latency and high throughput of the kinematic equations. The experiments of the proposed method are validated based on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware experimental platform, and the experimental results demonstrate that the computational time to complete the entire kinematic equations is 4.68 μs, of which the computational time for the kinematic positive solution is 0.52 μs and the computational time for the kinematic inverse solution is 4.16 μs.