Forward Kinematics vs. Inverse Kinematics. Not long ago, game characters were a lot like shellfish: they were basically piles of rock-hard segments.

This is referred to as “kinematics”, and can be considered in both the forward and inverse sense. [aerdronix] built a robotic arm build that works in both ways.

In forward kinematics, we specify the joint angles (arm, shoulder, wrist), and from this we can get an end-effector (hand) position. This is relatively simple to do, ...

The forward-kinematic calculations must be done at the outset when starting from an arbitrary configuration to establish the starting tool-tip coordinates for the initial move.