Kinematic Modeling of Robotic Manipulators

This paper presents the exhaustive review on the kinematic modeling of robotic manipulators in a systematic manner. A lot of techniques are available in the literature for kinematic modeling of robotic manipulators, however the ambiguity lies with the user to select the most appropriate method. This paper presents the comparative study of different kinematic modeling techniques in terms of complexity, applicability of the method to a particular class of robots and number of parameters or variables required to define the robot. Determination of the correct kinematic parameters, required to develop accurate kinematic models, using different methods has been demonstrated by considering the case study of a five degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) articulated manipulator. Moreover, a seven-DOFs manipulator is considered to highlight and address the inconsistencies of popular methods, while dealing with spatial hybrid manipulators. In this article, a review of 100 research papers is presented to investigate the kinematic study of robotic manipulators with a variety of modeling techniques, which are evolved or refined during the last sixty-odd years (1955–2016).