Digital hardware implementation of the forward/inverse kinematics for a SCARA robot manipulator

In this work, the development of a forward/inverse kinematics IP (intellectual property) based on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) technology is proposed which expects to complete the overall computation of the forward/inverse kinematics within few microseconds. However, FPGA is a suitable solution in this issue because it has the ability of the synchronous parallel processing and the high-speed operation. Firstly, the forward/inverse kinematics for SCARA robot is derived in this paper. Secondly the circuit behavior using VHDL (Very-High-Speed-IC Hardware Description Language) is described. The parameterized function is applied in the designed VHDL to increase the code flexible and the FSM (Finite state machine) is adopted to reduce the hardware resource usage in FPGA. Finally, the developed forward/inverse kinematics IP will be downloaded to FPGA to confirm its effectiveness and correctness.