Kinematic Analysis for Trajectory Planning of Open-Source 4-DoF Robot Arm

Many small and large industries use robot arms to establish a range of tasks such as picking and placing, and painting in today’s world. However, to complete these tasks, one of the most critical problems is to obtain the desire position of the robot arm’s end-effector. There are two methods for analyzing the robot arm: forward kinematic analysis and inverse kinematic analysis. This study aims to model the forward and inverse kinematic of an open-source 4 degrees of freedom (DoF) articulated robotic arm. A kinematic model is designed and further evaluated all the joint parameters to calculate the end-effector’s desired position. Forward kinematic is simple to design, but as for the inverse kinematic, a closed-form solution is needed. The developed kinematic model’s performance is assessed on a simulated robot arm, and the results were analyzed if the errors were produced within the accepted range. At the end of this study, forward kinematic and inverse kinematic solutions of a 4-DoF articulated robot arm are successfully modeled, which provides the theoretical basis for the subsequent analysis and research of the robot arm.