The SCARA powers much of the world’s high-speed assembly and pick-and-place operations, positioning parts accurately hundreds of times per minute.
Yet kinematically, it is one of the simplest robot arms. This video explores the RRP arrangement behind the SCARA: two revolute joints position the arm in the horizontal plane, while a prismatic joint controls its vertical movement. A fourth revolute joint can then set the orientation of the end-effector.
What makes this architecture so effective is its inverse kinematics. It has an exact, closed-form solution, allowing the required joint positions to be calculated in microseconds.
That speed is what enables a SCARA to repeatedly place components at precise points on a production line.
The equations are derived in Interactive Analysis of Industrial Robots, by our founder, Dr. Max Antonio Gonzalez-Palacios, and implemented directly in the accompanying software. There, you can configure and interactively explore the RRP architectures yourself. Second architecture in the series.
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