FPGA-Realization of Inverse Kinematics Control IP for Articulated and SCARA Robot

Abstract

The computation of kinematics/inverse kinematics in robot manipulators consumes much CPU time and certainly slows down the motion speed of robots. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a hardware implementation of inverse kinematics control IP (Intelligent properties) for robot manipulators based on the FPGA technology. One robot is an articulated type robot manipulator and the other one a SCARA type robot manipulator. In this chapter, the formulations of inverse kinematics for articulated type and SCARA-type robot manipulator are firstly derived. Then, VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) will be adopted to describe the aforementioned circuit behavior. The design of the VHDL code will apply the finite state machine (FSM) to reduce the hardware resource usage. Under this design, the executing time for computing the inverse kinematics algorithm needs only several micro-seconds. Finally, the simulation results of the inverse kinematic for two type robot manipulators will be compared using the Matlab and Quartus II software in order to demonstrate the effectiveness and correctness of the proposed FPGA-realization of inverse kinematics.