Initial Estimation of Kinematic Structure of a Robotic Manipulator as an Input for Its Synthesis

Researchers often deal with the synthesis of the kinematic structure of a robotic manipulator to determine the optimal manipulator for a given task. This approach can lower the cost of the manipulator and allow it to achieve poses that might be unreachable by universal manipulators in an existing constrained environment. Numerical methods are broadly used to find the optimum design but they often require an estimated initial kinematic structure as input, especially if local-optimum-search algorithms are used. This paper presents four different algorithms for such an estimation using the standard Denavit–Hartenberg convention. Two of the algorithms are able to reach a given position and the other two can reach both position and orientation using Bézier splines approximation and vector algebra. The results are demonstrated with three chosen example poses and are evaluated by measuring manipulability and the total link length of the final kinematic structures.