A CORDIC-based pipelined architecture for robot direct kinematic position computation

The authors describe a CORDIC-based pipelined architecture for computing a direct kinematic position solution based on the decomposition of the homogeneous link transformation matrix. It is found that a homogeneous link transformation matrix can be decomposed into a product of two matrices, each of which can be computed by two CORDIC processors arranged in parallel, forming a two-stage cascade CORDIC computational module. Extending this idea to an n-link manipulator, n two-stage CORDIC computational modules, consisting of 4 pi CORDIC processors, can be concatenated to form a pipelined architecture for computing the position and orientation of the end-effector of the manipulator. Since the initial delay time of the proposed pipelined architecture is 80n mu s and the pipelined time is 40 mu s, the proposed CORDIC-based architecture requires a total computation time of (80n+120) mu s for computing the position and orientation of the end-effector of an n-link manipulator.<>