IK for Dummies

So - you’ve built a robot arm. Now you’ve got to figure out how to control the damn thing. This was the situation I found myself in a few months ago, during my Masters project, and it’s a problem common to any robotic application: you want to put the end (specifically, the “end effector”) of your robot arm in a certain place, and to do that you have to figure out a valid pose for the arm which achieves that. This problem is called inverse kinematics (IK), and it’s one of the key problems in robotics.

First Post

What’s up! Hopefully this is going to turn into a place for me to leave interesting (or not) things that I write, make & do. For now it’s pretty empty, but there’s lots I want to talk about, including many, many small projects I’ve done in my time at university - see the sidebar on the homepage for pictures from a small selection.