Motion planning of a golf swing robot

We report our studies of a new motion planning method for a two-link golf swing robot. We introduce two fundamental properties of manipulator dynamics: the time-reversal symmetry property and the pendulum property. The former is used to reverse the rest-to-point pre-impact swing (backswing and downswing) into a symmetric point-to-rest swing in time, and the latter is used to design a proportional-derivative plus gravity, joint and coupling torque compensation control algorithm to plan the reversed pre-impact swing and the point-to-rest follow-through swing. By using this method, accurate impact position and hitting speed control of the golf swing and low computational cost are achieved. The introduced properties hold true for general multi-revolute-joint planar manipulators and the proposed motion planning algorithm can be implemented on them too.