Inverse Kinematics and Design of a

Novel 6-DoF Handheld Robot Arm

TalhaYousuf

Problem Statement
Design of a 6 Degrees Of Freedom has been explained in this paper. The robot falls under
category of Hand Held Robotics1 . The requirements of these robots being light weight, fast
and multi DOF. Such robots are mainly cable driven. Cable driven robots are a type of
parallel manipulators in which flexible cables are used as actuators. One end of each cable is
reeled around a rotor twisted by a motor, and the other end is connected to the end effector.

Dynamic analysis of parallel robots isnt same as cable driven robots because cables can only
pull an object, in other words forces in cables should be non-negative.

Workspace of a robot is a region in space where the end-effector is able to exert the required
force/moments when all cables are in tension.

Gregg-Smith and Mayol-Cuevas have done much research on workspace analysis and opti-
mization of handheld cable driven robots. Workspace and controllability of cable robots can be
enhanced by adding cables to structure of the robot. Redundancy2 plays a key role in design
of cable robots.

In this paper too Gregg-Smith and Mayol-Cuevas have optimized robotic arm to maximize
speed and configuration space alongwith reduction in mass. Moreover they also developed the
inverse kinematics of this robot. There are 6DOFs in total out of which 1 joint is redundant,
this leaves 5 DOFs. Inverse kinematics is solved by splitting 6DOFs into two 3DOF problems,
solving them separately and merging them in the end.

Previous work
Gregg-Smith and Mayol-Cuevas introduces the idea of a personal 4DOF cable driven robot,
operating in toolspace, feedback is provided intuitively by end effector pointing towards or
away from goal. Two generic evaluation tasks were performed being picking/placing objects
and aiming in space.

1
Hand held robots bridge gap between wearable and external robots, they are equipped with sensing, actu-
ation and task knowledge to cooperate with users in performing tasks.
2
A manipulator is termed kinematically redundant when it possesses more degrees of freedom than it is
needed to execute a given task. Redundancy can be conveniently exploited to achieve more dexterous robot
motions.

1
Bibliography

[1] A. Gregg-Smith and W. W. Mayol-Cuevas, Inverse kinematics and design of a novel 6-

dof handheld robot arm, in Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2016 IEEE International
Conference on, IEEE, 2016, pp. 21022109.
[2] , The design and evaluation of a cooperative handheld robot, in Robotics and Au-
tomation (ICRA), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, IEEE, 2015, pp. 19681975.