Samuel Williams Sunday, 10 February 2008

I developed a solution to the inverse kinematics problem using the A* algorithm to perform a discrete search through 3D space. My prelimiary research report outlines the approach, which I hope will eventually be useful in a practical robot.

The approach is based on the A* algorithm. A robotic armature is modeled as a series of quaternion rotations in 3D space and the configuration is fed into a heuristic function which looks at the current configuration with respect to the goal. When this error is within a specified tolerance, a solution is found.

In general, I found that this approach is far more reliable than other numerical solutions, and (I suspect) satisfies several useful properties:

Here is a video of the algorithm in action:

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