FABRIK based Inverse Kinematic Solution of Manipulator Robot

Accurate position and orientation information is important for a robotics manipulator to perform the task in a cluttered environment. To get the exact position information, it is important to solve the inverse kinematics (IK). There are many applications in which robot manipulators are used, such as picking and placing, hazardous places, handwriting, drawing, therapy, surgery in the medical field, and control operations. Thus, it is important to have the information of joint configuration and kinematic parameters for robot manipulators. The movement of the end effector of the robot manipulator is controlled by its joint angles. The forward kinematics (FK) refers to calculating cartesian coordinates for given joint angle values, which has a unique or closed-form solution. The IK provides the translation of Cartesian space to joint space. The drawback of inverse kinematics is, it does not provide a closed solution. Inverse Kinematics provides multiple solutions with high computational cost and very unrealistic poses. Forward And Backward Reaching Inverse Kinematics (FABRIK) is a simple algorithm in which manipulators take a specified point as reference and travel forward-backward continuously till they reach the point. It does not provide any rotational angles; it finds each joint position by finding a point on a vector. Therefore, it reaches the position in fewer iterations with a low computational cost. FABRIK supports any number of links and end effectors. This paper will compare the FABRIK with the IK solution about consistency, computational cost.