Fast implementation of direct robot kinematics with cordic systolic arrays

This paper deals with fast implementation of the direct kinematics equations of robotic manipulators, using systolic arrays that incorporate one CORDIC rotor in their processing elements. The rotation or the translation motions of the links are implemented by using a processing element of general form. The processing elements used for the revolute joints incorporate one CORDIC rotor and at most an adder and one inverter. The processing elements used for the prismatic joints incorporate at most two adders and one inverter. The overall systolic architecture is derived by cascading the processing elements that correspond to the successive links and pipelining the unidirectional linear array. The use of systolic arrays with CORDIC processors results into fast pipelined VLSI architectures, which may be used as peripheral devices to a host digital computer and are suitable for computation of the kinematic equations, in run-time operation.