A novel hybrid electromagnetism‐like algorithm for solving the inverse kinematics of robot

Purpose – This paper aims to develop a new real‐time effective method for solving the inverse kinematics (IK) problem, especially for those manipulators with high‐dimensional nonlinear kinematic equations. Design/methodology/approach – The paper transforms the IKs problem into a minimization problem. Then, a novel meta‐heuristic algorithm, called the electromagnetism‐like method (EM), is used to solve this equivalent problem. Moreover, in order to further improve the computational efficiency and accuracy of EM, a hybrid method which combines EM with the Davidon‐Fletcher‐Powell (DFP) method is proposed. Findings – The results showed that EM is a powerful yet easy algorithm for solving the IKs problem of robot manipulators. Its complexity is independent on the characteristics of the kinematic equations involving dimensionality and the degree of nonlinearity. Moreover, EM can be used as an accompanying algorithm for DFP method to get better precision at a lower iteration number. Originality/value – The method developed in this paper is a generalized approach that is efficient enough to obtain IK solutions independent of robot geometry and the number of degrees of freedom.