The path tracking phenomenon of a robotic manipulator arm plays an important role, when the manipulators are used in continuous path industrial applications, such as welding, machining and painting etc. Nowadays, robotic manipulators are extensively used in performing the said tasks in industry. Therefore, it is essential for the manipulator end effector to track the path designed to perform the task in an effective way. In this chapter, an attempt is made to develop a feedback control method for a 4-DOF spatial manipulator to track a path with the help of a PID controller. In order to design the said controller, the kinematic and dynamic models of the robotic manipulator are derived. Further, the concept of inverse kinematics has been used to track different paths, namely a straight line and parabolic paths continuously. The effectiveness of the developed algorithm is tested on a four degree of freedom manipulator arm in simulations.
Emulating a robotic manipulator arm with an hybrid motion-control system