ROBOTICS FUNDAMENTALS: Kinematics
Before a robot can move its hand somewhere, it has to solve a math problem.
That problem is kinematics. The relationship between a robot’s joint angles and where its hand actually ends up in space.
There are two directions to it. Forward kinematics asks: if I set my joints to these angles, where does my hand land? That one’s straightforward.
The hard one is inverse kinematics. I want my hand to reach that exact point. What angles do all my joints need to be? There can be many answers, or none, and the robot has to pick the best one in real time.
Every reach, every grasp, every step a robot takes is a kinematics problem being solved on the fly.
Before a robot can act, it has to know how its own body maps to the world.