Design of Inverse Kinematics IP for a Six-Axis Articulated Manipulator

An inverse kinematics IP (Intellectual Property) for six-axis articulated manipulator is investigated in this paper. Firstly, the formulation of the inverse kinematics for six-axis articulated manipulator is derived. Secondly, the computation algorithm and its hardware implementation of some key trigonometric functions are described. Thirdly, the IP design of inverse kinematics is illustrated and VHDL (Very high speed IC Hardware Description Language) is used to describe the overall behavior of the proposed IP. Additionally, VHDL code will apply the parameterized function to increase the code flexibility and the FSM (Finite state machine) is used to reduce the hardware resource usage. Finally, to verify the correctness of the proposed inverse kinematics IP, a co-simulation work is constructed by ModelSim and Simulink. The inverse kinematics hardware IP is run by ModelSim and Simulink models is taken as a test bench that generates stimulus to ModelSim and display the output response. Under this design, computing the inverse kinematics algorithm can be completed within several micro-second.