Kinematics-based studies on a 7-DOF redundant manipulator

Traditional industrial robots require at least 6-degree-of-freedom (DOF) to completely specify the position and orientation of the end-effector in the 3D space. However, extra DOF enables the robot to accomplish more challenging tasks such as obstacle avoidance, torque optimization, fault tolerance, etc. at the price of increasingly complicated kinematics. This paper is aimed at investigating some kinematics-related problems associated with a 7-DOF robot, including forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, Jacobian matrix, and collision detection, to set up the base for future researches.