Distributed method for inverse kinematics of all serial manipulators

This paper deals with a new numerical method to solve the inverse kinematics of all serial, special or general, manipulators. This method uses a new concept from Distributed Artificial Intelligence, multi-agent systems, which allows to distribute the resolution of this problem. This concept is used with a new formulation of the problem associated to each Local frame. This iterative and distributed algorithm is able to find all solutions of the inverse kinematics for all kinds of manipulators (6R, 5R1P, 4R2P, 3R3P). Moreover, we will show that this method can be applied to redundant manipulators. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.