Robotic Kinematics and Statics

In order to model an open serial-chain robot arm kinematically, we need not only to represent a 6 d.o.f. rigid motion in Cartesian space for the purpose of task/path description, but also to determine a complete transformation along the entire serial-chain robot body in joint space for the purpose of joint values determination. During the 1950’s, Denavit and Hartenberg had independently developed a wonderful procedure to uniquely determine all the joint parameters plus variables for an open serial-chain robotic manipulator. Today, almost everyone recognizes that the D-H procedure is the best approach to uniquely modeling robotic kinematics, which is commonly called the D-H Convention [1, 2, 4].