Kinematic analysis and mechanical design of a humanoid manipulator

Object manipulation is an important function for humanoid robots, so arms should fling fast with large loads and move like human. The paper presents kinematic analysis and mechanical design of a 7DOF manipulator. Modular design, dynamic simulation, finite element analysis and experiments testing are introduced to design a light weight and high stiffness arm. The scheme is proved to be useful for improving its performances. Meanwhile, lookup table and inverse kinematics calculation are used to obtain optimal solution. In our algorithm, the redundancy is solved and the manipulator's natural posture is derived conveniently. Experiments show the feasibility of the method.