Deriving a robot’s transform matrices

While doing some soul searching recently, I realised that in previous posts I’ve glossed over actually deriving transform matrices, and haven’t discussed a methodical way of going about it. If you’ve ever tried working out transforms you know they can be a pain if you don’t know have a set process to follow. Although I’ve given a bunch of examples in previous posts, this post is intended to clear up any confusion that crops up when you’re trying to work out the transforms for your own robot. This is far from an absolute guide covering all the cases, but hopefully it gives a firm enough footing that you can handle the rest.

Note: I’m only going to be dealing with revolute joints in this post. Linear joints are easy (just put the joint offset in the translation part of the transform matrix) and spherical joints are horrible death beyond the scope of this post.

First thing’s first, quick recap of what transform matrices actually are. A transform matrix changes the coordinate system (reference frame) a point is defined in. We’re using the notation $\textbf{T}_0^1$ to denote a transformation matrix that transforms a point from reference frame 1 to reference frame 0. To calculate this matrix, we described the transformation from reference frame 0 to reference frame 1.

To make things easier, we’re going to break up each transform matrix into two parts. Unfortunately I haven’t found a great way to denote these two matrices, so we’re going to have to use additional subscripts:

1. $\textbf{T}^{i+1}_{ia}$: accounting for the joint rotation, and
2. $\textbf{T}^{i+1}_{ib}$: accounting for static translations and rotations.

So the $\textbf{T}_a$ matrix accounts for transformations that involve joint angles, and the $\textbf{T}_b$ matrix accounts for all the static transformations between reference frames.

Step 1: Account for the joint rotation

When calculating the transform matrix from a joint to a link’s centre-of-mass (COM), note that the reference frame of the link’s COM rotates along with the angle of the joint. Conversely, the joint’s reference frame does not rotate with the joint angle. Look at this picture!

In these pictures, we’re looking at the transformation from joint i’s reference frame to the COM for link i. $q_i$ denotes the joint angle of joint i. In the first image (on the left) the joint angle is almost 90 degrees, and on the right it’s closer to 45 degrees. Keeping in mind that the reference frame for COM i changes with the joint angle, and the reference frame for joint i does not, helps make deriving the transform matrices much easier.

So, to actually account for joint rotation, all you have to do is determine which axis the joint is rotating around and create the appropriate rotation matrix inside the transform.

For rotations around the x axis:

$\left[\begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & \textrm{cos}(q_i) & -\textrm{sin}(q_i) & 0 \\ 0 & \textrm{sin}(q_i) & \textrm{cos}(q_i) & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1\end{array}\right]$

For rotations around the y axis:

$\left[\begin{array}{cccc} \textrm{cos}(q_i) & 0 & -\textrm{sin}(q_i) & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ \textrm{sin}(q_i) & 0 & \textrm{cos}(q_i) & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1\end{array}\right]$

For rotations around the z axis:

$\left[\begin{array}{cccc} \textrm{cos}(q_i) & -\textrm{sin}(q_i) & 0 & 0 \\ \textrm{sin}(q_i) & \textrm{cos}(q_i) & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1\end{array}\right]$

And there you go! Easy. The $\textbf{T}_a$ should be one of the above matrices unless something fairly weird is going on. For the arm in the diagram above, the joint is rotating around the $z$ axis, so

$\textbf{T}_a = \left[\begin{array}{cccc} \textrm{cos}(q_i) & -\textrm{sin}(q_i) & 0 & 0 \\ \textrm{sin}(q_i) & \textrm{cos}(q_i) & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1\end{array}\right]$

Step 2: Account for translations and any static axes rotations

Once the joint rotation is accounted for, translations become much simpler to deal with: Just put joint i at 0 degrees and the offset from the origin of reference frame i to i+1 is your translation.

So for the above example, this is what the system looks like when joint i is at 0 degrees:

where I’ve also added labels to the $x$ and $y$ axes for clarity. Say that the COM is at $(1, 0)$, then that is what you set the $x, y$ translation values to in the $\textbf{T}_b$.

Also we need to note that there is a rotation in the axes between reference frames (i.e. $x$ and $y$ do not point in the same direction for both axes sets). Here the rotation is 90 degrees. So the rotation part of the transformation matrix should be a 90 degree rotation.

Thus, the transformation matrix for our static translations and rotations is

$\textbf{T}_b = \left[\begin{array}{cccc} 0 & -1 & 0 & 1 \\ 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1\end{array}\right]$

Step 3: Putting them together

This is pretty easy, to compute the full transform from joint i to the COM i you just string together the two matrices derived above:

$\textbf{T}^{COM_i}_{joint_i} = \textbf{T}_a \textbf{T}_b$

where I’m using simplified notation on the left-hand side because we don’t need the full notation for clarity in this simple example.

So when you’re transforming a point, you left multiply by $\textbf{T}$:

$\textbf{x}_{joint_i} = \textbf{T}^{COM_i}_{joint_i} \textbf{x}_{COM_i} = \textbf{T}_a \textbf{T}_b \textbf{x}_{COM_i},$

which is not great notation, but hopefully conveys the idea. To get our point $\textbf{x}$ into the reference frame of joint i, we left multiply the point as defined in the reference frame of COM i by $\textbf{T}^{COM_i}_{joint_i}$.

So there you go! That’s the process for a single joint to COM transform. For transforms from COM to joints it’s even easier because you only need to account for the static offsets and axes rotations.

Examples

It’s always nice to have examples, so let’s work through the deriving the transform matrices for the Jaco2 arm as it’s set up in the VREP. The process is pretty straight-forward, with really the only tricky bit converting from the Euler angles that VREP gives you to a rotation matrix that we can use in our transform.

But first thing’s first, load up VREP and drop in a Jaco2 model.

NOTE: I’ve renamed the joints and links to start at 0, to make indexing in / interfacing with VREP easier.

We’re going to generate the transforms for the whole arm piece by piece, sequentially: origin -> link 0 COM, link 0 COM -> joint 0, joint 0 -> link 1 COM, etc. I’m going to use the notation $l_i$ and $j_i$ to denote link i COM and joint i, respectively, in the transform sub and superscripts.

The first transform we want then is for origin -> link 0 COM. There’s no joint rotation that we need to account for in this transform, so we only have to look for static translation and rotation. First click on link 0, and then

• ‘Object/item shift’ button from the toolbar,
• the ‘Position’ tab,
• select the ‘Parent frame’ radio button,

and it will provide you with the translation of link 0’s COM relative to its parent frame, as shown below:

So the translation part of our transformation is $[0, 0, .0784]^T$.

The rotation part we can see by

• ‘Object/item rotate’ button from the toolbar,
• the ‘Orientation’ tab,
• select the ‘Parent frame’ radio button,

Here, it’s not quite as straight forward to use this info to fill in our transform matrix. So, if we pull up the VREP description for their Euler angles we see that to generate the rotation matrix from them you perform:

$\textbf{R} = \textbf{R}_x(\alpha) \textbf{R}_y(\beta) \textbf{R}_z(\gamma)$

where the $\textbf{R}_i$ matrix is a rotation matrix around the $i$ axis (as described above). For $(\alpha=0, \beta=0, \gamma=0)$ this works out to no rotation, as you may have guessed. So then our first transform is

$\textbf{T}^{l0}_{orgin} = \left[ \begin{array}{cccc}1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & .0784 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1\end{array} \right]$

For the second transform matrix, from link 0 to joint 0, again we only have to account for static translations and rotations. Pulling up the translation information:

we have the translation $[0, 0, 0.0784]^T$.

And this time, for our rotation matrix, there’s a flip in the axes so we have something more interesting than no rotation:

we have Euler angles $(-180, 0, 0)$. This is also a good time to note that the angles are provided in degrees, so let’s convert those over, giving us approximately $(\pi, 0, 0)$. Now, calculating our rotation matrix:

$\textbf{R} = \textbf{R}_x(\alpha) \textbf{R}_y(\beta) \textbf{R}_z(\gamma)$

$\textbf{R}^{j0}_{l0} = \left[ \begin{array}{ccc}1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & \textrm{cos}(\pi) & -\textrm{sin}(\pi) \\ 0 & \textrm{sin}(\pi) & \textrm{cos}(\pi) \end{array} \right] \left[ \begin{array}{ccc}\textrm{cos}(0) & 0 & -\textrm{sin}(0) \\ 0 & 1 & 0 \\ \textrm{sin}(0) & 0 & \textrm{cos}(0) \end{array} \right] \left[ \begin{array}{ccc} \textrm{cos}(0) & -\textrm{sin}(0) & 0 \\ \textrm{sin}(0) & \textrm{cos}(0) & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right]$

$\textbf{R}^{j0}_{l0} = \left[ \begin{array}{ccc}1 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & -1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & -1 \end{array} \right]$

which then gives us the transform matrix

$\textbf{T}^{j0}_{l0} = \left[ \begin{array}{cccc}1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & -1 & 0 & 0\\ 0 & 0 & -1 & 0.0784 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1\end{array} \right].$

And the last thing I’ll show here is accounting for the joint rotation. In the transform from joint 0 to link 1 we have to account for the joint rotation, so we’ll break it down into two matrices as described above. To generate the first one, all we need to know is which axis the joint rotates around. In VREP, this is almost always the $z$ axis, but it’s good to double check in case someone has built a weird model. To check, one easy way is to make the joint visible, and the surrounding arm parts invisible:

You can do this by

• double clicking on the joint in the scene hierarchy to get to the Scene Object Properties window,
• selecting the ‘Common’ tab,
• selecting or deselecting check boxes from the ‘Visibility’ box.

As you can see in the image, this joint is indeed rotating around the $z$ axis, so the first part of our transformation from joint 0 to link 1 is

$\textbf{T}^{l1}_{j0a} = \left[ \begin{array}{cccc}\textrm{cos}(q_0) & -\textrm{sin}(q_0) & 0 & 0 \\ \textrm{sin}(q_0) & \textrm{cos}(q_0) & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1\end{array} \right]$

The second matrix can be generated as previously described, so I’ll leave that, and the rest of the arm, to you!

If you’d like to see a full arm example, you can check out the tranforms for the UR5 model in VREP up on my GitHub.

Operational space control of 6DOF robot arm with spiking cameras part 2: Deriving the Jacobian

In the previous exciting post in this series I outlined the project, which is in the title, and we worked through getting access to the arm through Python. The next step was deriving the Jacobian, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this post!

Alright.
This was a time I was very glad to have a previous post talking about generating transformation matrices, because deriving the Jacobian for a 6DOF arm in 3D space comes off as a little daunting when you’re used to 3DOF in 2D space, and I needed a reminder of the derivation process. The first step here was finding out which motors were what, so I went through and found out how each motor moved with something like the following code:

for ii in range(7):
target_angles = np.zeros(7, dtype='float32')
target_angles[ii] = np.pi / 4.0
rob.move(target_angles)
time.sleep(1)


and I found that the robot is setup in the figures below

this is me trying my hand at making things clearer using Inkscape, hopefully it’s worked. Displayed are the first 6 joints and their angles of rotation, $q_0$ through $q_5$. The 7th joint, $q_6$, opens and closes the gripper, so we’re safe to ignore it in deriving our Jacobian. The arm segment lengths $l_1, l_3,$ and $l_5$ are named based on the nearest joint angles (makes easier reading in the Jacobian derivation).

Find the transformation matrix from end-effector to origin

So first thing’s first, let’s find the transformation matrices. Our first joint, $q_0$, rotates around the $z$ axis, so the rotational part of our transformation matrix $^0_\textrm{org}\textbf{T}$ is

$^0_\textrm{org}\textbf{R} = \left[ \begin{array}{ccc} \textrm{cos}(q_0) & -\textrm{sin}(q_0) & 0 \\ \textrm{sin}(q_0) & \textrm{cos}(q_0) & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right],$

and $q_0$ and our origin frame of reference are on top of each other so we don’t need to account for translation, so our translation component of $^0_\textrm{org}\textbf{T}$ is

$^0_\textrm{org}\textbf{D} = \left[ \begin{array}{c} 0 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{array} \right].$

Stacking these together to form our first transformation matrix we have

$^0_\textrm{org}\textbf{T} = \left[ \begin{array}{cc} ^0_\textrm{org}\textbf{R} & ^0_\textrm{org}\textbf{D} \\ 0 & 1 \end{array} \right] = \left[ \begin{array}{cccc} \textrm{cos}(q_0) & -\textrm{sin}(q_0) & 0 & 0\\ \textrm{sin}(q_0) & \textrm{cos}(q_0) & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right] .$

So now we are able to convert a position in 3D space from to the reference frame of joint $q_0$ back to our origin frame of reference. Let’s keep going.

Joint $q_1$ rotates around the $x$ axis, and there is a translation along the arm segment $l_1$. Our transformation matrix looks like

$^1_0\textbf{T} = \left[ \begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & \textrm{cos}(q_1) & -\textrm{sin}(q_1) & l_1 \textrm{cos}(q_1) \\ 0 & \textrm{sin}(q_1) & \textrm{cos}(q_1) & l_1 \textrm{sin}(q_1) \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right] .$

Joint $q_2$ also rotates around the $x$ axis, but there is no translation from $q_2$ to $q_3$. So our transformation matrix looks like

$^2_1\textbf{T} = \left[ \begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & \textrm{cos}(q_2) & -\textrm{sin}(q_2) & 0 \\ 0 & \textrm{sin}(q_2) & \textrm{cos}(q_2) & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right] .$

The next transformation matrix is a little tricky, because you might be tempted to say that it’s rotating around the $z$ axis, but actually it’s rotating around the $y$ axis. This is determined by where $q_3$ is mounted relative to $q_2$. If it was mounted at 90 degrees from $q_2$ then it would be rotating around the $z$ axis, but it’s not. For translation, there’s a translation along the $y$ axis up to the next joint, so all in all the transformation matrix looks like:

$^3_2\textbf{T} = \left[ \begin{array}{cccc} \textrm{cos}(q_3) & 0 & -\textrm{sin}(q_3) & 0\\ 0 & 1 & 0 & l_3 \\ \textrm{sin}(q_3) & 0 & \textrm{cos}(q_3) & 0\\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right] .$

And then the transformation matrices for coming from $q_4$ to $q_3$ and $q_5$ to $q_4$ are the same as the previous set, so we have

$^4_3\textbf{T} = \left[ \begin{array}{cccc} 1 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & \textrm{cos}(q_4) & -\textrm{sin}(q_4) & 0 \\ 0 & \textrm{sin}(q_4) & \textrm{cos}(q_4) & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right] .$

and

$^5_4\textbf{T} = \left[ \begin{array}{cccc} \textrm{cos}(q_5) & 0 & -\textrm{sin}(q_5) & 0 \\ 0 & 1 & 0 & l_5 \\ \textrm{sin}(q_5) & 0 & \textrm{cos}(q_5) & 0\\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 1 \end{array} \right] .$

Alright! Now that we have all of the transformation matrices, we can put them together to get the transformation from end-effector coordinates to our reference frame coordinates!

$^\textrm{ee}_\textrm{org}\textbf{T} = ^0_\textrm{org}\textbf{T} \; ^1_0\textbf{T} \; ^2_1\textbf{T} \; ^3_2\textbf{T} \; ^4_3\textbf{T} \; ^5_4\textbf{T}.$

At this point I went and tested this with some sample points to make sure that everything seemed to be being transformed properly, but we won’t go through that here.

Calculate the derivative of the transform with respect to each joint

The next step in calculating the Jacobian is getting the derivative of $^\textrm{ee}_\textrm{org}T$. This could be a big ol’ headache to do it by hand, OR we could use SymPy, the symbolic computation package for Python. Which is exactly what we’ll do. So after a quick

sudo pip install sympy


I wrote up the following script to perform the derivation for us

import sympy as sp

def calc_transform():
# set up our joint angle symbols (6th angle doesn't affect any kinematics)
q = [sp.Symbol('q0'), sp.Symbol('q1'), sp.Symbol('q2'), sp.Symbol('q3'),
sp.Symbol('q4'), sp.Symbol('q5')]
# set up our arm segment length symbols
l1 = sp.Symbol('l1')
l3 = sp.Symbol('l3')
l5 = sp.Symbol('l5')

Torg0 = sp.Matrix([[sp.cos(q[0]), -sp.sin(q[0]), 0, 0,],
[sp.sin(q[0]), sp.cos(q[0]), 0, 0],
[0, 0, 1, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 1]])

T01 = sp.Matrix([[1, 0, 0, 0],
[0, sp.cos(q[1]), -sp.sin(q[1]), l1*sp.cos(q[1])],
[0, sp.sin(q[1]), sp.cos(q[1]), l1*sp.sin(q[1])],
[0, 0, 0, 1]])

T12 = sp.Matrix([[1, 0, 0, 0],
[0, sp.cos(q[2]), -sp.sin(q[2]), 0],
[0, sp.sin(q[2]), sp.cos(q[2]), 0],
[0, 0, 0, 1]])

T23 = sp.Matrix([[sp.cos(q[3]), 0, sp.sin(q[3]), 0],
[0, 1, 0, l3],
[-sp.sin(q[3]), 0, sp.cos(q[3]), 0],
[0, 0, 0, 1]])

T34 = sp.Matrix([[1, 0, 0, 0],
[0, sp.cos(q[4]), -sp.sin(q[4]), 0],
[0, sp.sin(q[4]), sp.cos(q[4]), 0],
[0, 0, 0, 1]])

T45 = sp.Matrix([[sp.cos(q[5]), 0, sp.sin(q[5]), 0],
[0, 1, 0, l5],
[-sp.sin(q[5]), 0, sp.cos(q[5]), 0],
[0, 0, 0, 1]])

T = Torg0 * T01 * T12 * T23 * T34 * T45

# position of the end-effector relative to joint axes 6 (right at the origin)
x = sp.Matrix([0,0,0,1])

Tx = T * x

for ii in range(6):
print q[ii]
print sp.simplify(Tx[0].diff(q[ii]))
print sp.simplify(Tx[1].diff(q[ii]))
print sp.simplify(Tx[2].diff(q[ii]))


And then consolidated the output using some variable shorthand to write a function that accepts in joint angles and generates the Jacobian:

def calc_jacobian(q):
J = np.zeros((3, 7))

c0 = np.cos(q[0])
s0 = np.sin(q[0])
c1 = np.cos(q[1])
s1 = np.sin(q[1])
c3 = np.cos(q[3])
s3 = np.sin(q[3])
c4 = np.cos(q[4])
s4 = np.sin(q[4])

c12 = np.cos(q[1] + q[2])
s12 = np.sin(q[1] + q[2])

l1 = self.l1
l3 = self.l3
l5 = self.l5

J[0,0] = -l1*c0*c1 - l3*c0*c12 - l5*((s0*s3 - s12*c0*c3)*s4 + c0*c4*c12)
J[1,0] = -l1*s0*c1 - l3*s0*c12 + l5*((s0*s12*c3 + s3*c0)*s4 - s0*c4*c12)
J[2,0] = 0

J[0,1] = (l1*s1 + l3*s12 + l5*(s4*c3*c12 + s12*c4))*s0
J[1,1] = -(l1*s1 + l3*s12 + l5*s4*c3*c12 + l5*s12*c4)*c0
J[2,1] = l1*c1 + l3*c12 - l5*(s4*s12*c3 - c4*c12)

J[0,2] = (l3*s12 + l5*(s4*c3*c12 + s12*c4))*s0
J[1,2] = -(l3*s12 + l5*s4*c3*c12 + l5*s12*c4)*c0
J[2,2] = l3*c12 - l5*(s4*s12*c3 - c4*c12)

J[0,3] = -l5*(s0*s3*s12 - c0*c3)*s4
J[1,3] = l5*(s0*c3 + s3*s12*c0)*s4
J[2,3] = -l5*s3*s4*c12

J[0,4] = l5*((s0*s12*c3 + s3*c0)*c4 + s0*s4*c12)
J[1,4] = l5*((s0*s3 - s12*c0*c3)*c4 - s4*c0*c12)
J[2,4] = -l5*(s4*s12 - c3*c4*c12)

return J


Alright! Now we have our Jacobian! Really the only time consuming part here was calculating our end-effector to origin transformation matrix, generating the Jacobian was super easy using SymPy once we had that.

Hack position control using the Jacobian

Great! So now that we have our Jacobian we’ll be able to translate forces that we want to apply to the end-effector into joint torques that we want to apply to the arm motors. Since we can’t control applied force to the motors though, and have to pass in desired angle positions, we’re going to do a hack approximation. Let’s first transform our forces from end-effector space into a set of joint angle torques:

$\textbf{u} = \textbf{J}^T \; \textbf{u}_\textbf{x}.$

To approximate the control then we’re simply going to take the current set of joint angles (which we know because it’s whatever angles we last told the system to move to) and add a scaled down version of $\textbf{u}$ to approximate applying torque that affects acceleration and then velocity.

$\textbf{q}_\textrm{des} = \textbf{q} + \alpha \; \textbf{u},$

where $\alpha$ is the gain term, I used .001 here because it was nice and slow, so no crazy commands that could break the servos would be sent out before I could react and hit the cancel button.

What we want to do then to implement operational space control here then is find the current $(x,y,z)$ position of the end-effector, calculate the difference between it and the target end-effector position, use that to generate the end-effector control signal $u_x$, get the Jacobian for the current state of the arm using the function above, find the set of joint torques to apply, approximate this control by generating a set of target joint angles to move to, and then repeat this whole loop until we’re within some threshold of the target position. Whew.

So, a lot of steps, but pretty straight forward to implement. The method I wrote to do it looks something like:

def move_to_xyz(self, xyz_d):
"""
np.array xyz_d: 3D target (x_d, y_d, z_d)
"""
count = 0
while (1):
count += 1
# get control signal in 3D space
xyz = self.calc_xyz()
delta_xyz = xyz_d - xyz
ux = self.kp * delta_xyz

# transform to joint space
J = self.calc_jacobian()
u = np.dot(J.T, ux)

# target joint angles are current + uq (scaled)
self.q[...] += u * .001
self.robot.move(np.asarray(self.q.copy(), 'float32'))

if np.sqrt(np.sum(delta_xyz**2)) < .1 or count > 1e4:
break


And that is it! We have successfully hacked together a system that can perform operational space control of a 6DOF robot arm. Here is a very choppy video of it moving around to some target points in a grid on a cube.

So, granted I had to drop a lot of frames from the video to bring it’s size down to something close to reasonable, but still you can see that it moves to target locations super fast!

Alright this is sweet, but we’re not done yet. We don’t want to have to tell the arm where to move ourselves. Instead we’d like the robot to perform target tracking for some target LED we’re moving around, because that’s way more fun and interactive. To do this, we’re going to use spiking cameras! So stay tuned, we’ll talk about what the hell spiking cameras are and how to use them for a super quick-to-setup and foolproof target tracking system in the next exciting post!