Serial manipulator

Serial manipulators are by far the most common industrial robots. Often they have an anthropomorphic mechanical arm structure, i.e. a serial chain of rigid links, connected by (mostly revolute) joints, forming a "shoulder", an "elbow", and a "wrist". Their main advantage is their large workspace with respect to their own volume and occupied floor space. Their main disadvantages are

• the low stiffness inherent to an open kinematic structure
• errors are accumulated and amplified from link to link
• the fact that they have to carry and move the large weight of most of the actuators
• the relatively low effective load that they can manipulate

Kinematics

The position and orientation of a robot's end effector are derived from the joint positions by means of a geometric model of the robot arm. For serial robots, the mapping from joint positions to end-effector pose is easy, the inverse mapping is more difficult. Therefore, most industrial robots have special designs that reduce the complexity of the inverse mapping.

Manufacturers

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