Abstract
Binary manipulators have recently received much attention due to hyper-redundancy, light weight, good controllability and high reliability. The precise positioning of the manipulator end-effecter requires the use of many modules, which results in a high-dimensional workspace. When the workspace dimension is large, existing inverse kinematics methods such as the Ebert-Uphoff algorithm may require impractically large memory size in determining the binary positions of all actuators. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new inverse kinematics algorithm: the inverse kinematics problem is formulated as an optimization problem using real-valued design variables, The key procedure in this approach is to transform the integer-variable optimization problem to a real-variable optimization problem and to push the real-valued design variables as closely as possible to the permissible binary values. Since the actual optimization is performed in real-valued design variables, the design sensitivity becomes readily available, and the optimization method becomes extremely efficient. Because the proposed formulation is quite general, other design considerations such as operation power minimization can be easily considered.
