This study presents a fast inverse
kinematics algorithm for a class of robots, including PUMA and
SCARA. It decomposes a robot Jacobian into a product of
sub-matrices to locate singularities. Singular value decomposition (SVD) is applied
to each singular sub-matrix to find a local least-squares inverse.
Perfect inverses are derived for all non-singular sub-matrices. The proposed
algorithm is extremely fast. A total inverse requires 54 flops
for PUMA and 43 for SCARA. Simulation and experiment are
conducted to test the accuracy and real-time speed of the
algorithm.