Inverse Kinematics Analysis of Novel 6-Dof Robotic Arm Manipulator for Oil and Gas Welding Using Grey Wolf Algorithm

Abstract

his paper presents a grey-wolf algorithm for solving the inverse kinematics of a newly designed 6-degree-of-freedom robotic arm for oil and gas pipeline welding which has not been used in the literature. Consequently, due to the robot’s multiple joints with compounding combinatory possibilities of joint angles, analysis of the inverse kinematics is relatively complex. In this research, grey-wolf algorithm, a swarm-based meta-heuristic algorithm, has been used to solve for the inverse kinematics of the robotic arm with respect to tracking a rectangular trajectory with six sets of waypoints in the 3D [X, Y, Z] space. The results were further analyzed in terms of the accuracy of the position of end effector from the accurate position of the rectangular target trajectory via a mean squared error cost function. Furthermore, results of comparison between the grey-wolf algorithm and the particle swarm optimisation, an alternate swarm algorithm with respect to position error from the inverse kinematics task is also presented. The results obtained via simulation clearly demonstrates the superior performance of the grey-wolf algorithm compared to particle swarm optimisation with respect to the solving an inverse kinematics task