Today’s world is going through what is known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Robots have been gaining more and more space in the industry and going beyond expectations. The use of robots in industry is related to the increasing production and the quality of the electronic products. For an accurate movement of a robot manipulator it is necessary to obtain its inverse kinematic model, however, obtaining this model requires the challenging solution of a set of nonlinear equations. For this system of nonlinear equations there is no generic solution method. In view of this matter, this research aims to solve the problem of the inverse kinematics of a robot manipulator using artificial neural networks without the need to model the robot’s direct kinematics. Two neural network training methodologies, called offline training and online training were used. The basic difference between these two is that in the offline methodology all training points are obtained before any training of the neural network occurs, whereas in online training the use of a training method is recurrent. As the robot moves, new training points are obtained and training processes with the new acquired points are executed, allowing a learning process of continuous inverse kinematics. To validate the proposed methodology a prototype of a manipulated planar robot with one degree of freedom was developed and several architectures of neural networks were tested to find the optimal architecture. The offline training methodology obtained very satisfactory results for most of the neural network architectures tested. The online training only achieved satisfactory results in neural network architectures with quantities of neurons much larger than the quantities used in the architectures used in offline training and still obtained inferior results. The neural networks trained in offline mode, when compared to the training networks in the online mode, presented a greater capacity of generalization and a smaller value of output error. The online training has only achieved satisfactory results in neural network architectures with quantities of neurons much larger than the quantities used in the trained architectures in offline mode.
2A1-E13 Method for Solving Inverse Kinematics of Robot Manipulator using Genetic Algorithm and Neural Network
