Publication

Abstract : Serial manipulators/robots are used extensively in industries to perform various tasks such as pick-andplace operation, painting, arc-welding, assembly of components etc. To perform tasks accurately, exact kinematic parameters of the manipulator are required. Note that these parameters are generally represented using the well-known Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) parameters. Typically, a set of nominal DH parameters are provided by the robot manufacturers, which may not be exact due to assembly errors etc. Hence, there is a need to know them exactly. In this paper, a novel analytic method is proposed to extract DH parameters of a robot manipulator. For this, each joint axis of a manipulator consisting of a direction and a point on it are provided as input to the proposed algorithm. The exact DH parameters are then extracted recursively from base link to the end-effector using the concepts of Plücker coordinates and Dual Vector Algebra. The algorithm has been implemented as an addin/plugin inside Autdoesk Inventor CAD software, which determines the DH parameters of a serial manipulator from its CAD model.