Abstract: An approach, which analyzed the redundant robotic manipulator’s inverse kinematics based on self-motion manifold, is presented. For the points in redundant robot’s workspace, according to the mapping relation between the joint space manifold and the workspace manifold, the natural coordinates of points are taken as independent motion parameters to analyze the self-motion of redundant robot, this method is applied to analyze the self-motion of the 7-DOF automatic fiber placement robotic manipulator, the self-motion manifold of 7-DOF automatic fiber placement robotic manipulator is obtained. The self-motion curves of 7-DOF automatic fiber placement robotic manipulator derived by parameterized and numerical methods are compared; the results show that the self-motion curves of 7-DOF automatic fiber placement robotic manipulator derived by these two methods are highly consistent, therefore the parameterized method that is used to analyze the self-motion manifold of the redundant robotic manipulator is an effective approach to resolve the inverse kinematics of the redundant robotic manipulator.

Key words: Fiber placement, Parameterization, Redundant robotic manipulator, Self-motion manifold