A design of pipelined architecture for computing robot direct kinematics

A novel CORDIC-based pipelined architecture for computing a direct kinematic position solution based on the decomposition of the homogeneous link transformation matrix is proposed. The approach is based on the fact that a homogeneous link transformation matrix can be decomposed into a product of two matrices, each of which can be computed by two CORDIC processors arranged in parallel, forming a two-stage cascade CORDIC computational module. Extending this idea to an n-link manipulator, n two-stage CORDIC computational modules, consisting of 4n CORDIC processors, can be concatenated to form a pipelined architecture for computing the position and orientation of the end-effector of the manipulator. The proposed CORDIC-based architecture requires a total computation time of (80n +120) μm for computing the position and orientation of the end-effector of an n-link manipulator. An application of the scheme to compute the Jacobian matrix computation is discussed