A General Method for Kinematic Analysis of Robotic Wrist Mechanisms

The paper presents a novel and simple technique for the kinematic analysis of bevel gear trains (BGT). The approach is based on edge-oriented graphs for efficient computation of BGT's absolute and relative velocities of links using incidence matrices. The kinematic equations are generated in matrix form using a cycle basis from a cycle matroid. The set of independent equations is automatically obtained from matrix orthogonalities and not by taking derivatives. Equation coefficients are expressed as function of speed ratios and have minimal variables. Then the relationships between the output and input angular velocities can be determined. In addition, a simple procedure is demonstrated to check for mechanism singularities. The method presented here has general applicability and can be employed for spatial geared mechanisms with any number of gears and degrees of freedom (DOF) as illustrated by numerical examples of robotic wrist mechanisms.