Robotic arm

The links of such a manipulator are connected by joints allowing either rotational motion (such as in an articulated robot) or translational (linear) displacement.

At least six degrees of freedom are required to enable the robot hand to reach an arbitrary pose (position and orientation) in three dimensional space.

Additional degrees of freedom allow to change the configuration of some link on the arm (e.g., elbow up/down), while keeping the robot hand in the same pose.

Inverse kinematics is the mathematical process to calculate the configuration of an arm, typically in terms of joint angles, given a desired pose of the robot hand in three dimensional space.

The end effector, or robotic hand, can be designed to perform any desired task such as welding, gripping, spinning etc., depending on the application.

The Canadarm while deploying a payload from the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle
6 Axis Articulated Robots from KUKA
Humans+ exhibit
uArm Metal Commercial Robot Arm [ 4 ]
MeArm Open-source robotics Arm [ 5 ]
Animation of the InSight lander's seismometer being lifted off the saucer by its robotic arm and placed on the surface of Mars
Robotic arm installs primary mirror segments of the James Webb Space Telescope .
The Canadarm reaches for a space resupply spacecraft in Earth orbit.
Robotic hand