Kinematics Modeling and Experimental Verification of Baxter Robot

The Baxter (R) humanoid robot made by Rethink Robotics (TM) offers users an affordable platform with guaranteed safety for both academic and industrial applications. The platform provides the users a good opportunity to carry out research on dual-arm robot manipulation and vision based control. For simulation of the Baxter (R) robot, a proper kinematic and dynamic model should be built. The Baxter robot uses URDF file to describe the robot kinematics, i.e., the relationship between adjacent joint and link. Consider the large difference between the structure of URDF and the conventional Denavit-Hartenburg(DH) notations which are widely used in robotics literature, we perform rigorous theoretic analysis of kinematics of Baxter (R) robot including all limbs. A kinematics model has been built following DH convention, and has been implemented in the MATLAB Robotics Toolbox. Extensive comparison between simulation and experimental results has verified the validity of the kinematic model.