Singularity Avoidance in Inverse Kinematics: A Unified Treatment of Classical and Learning-based Methods
For researchers and practitioners in robotics, this paper bridges a gap between classical and learning-based IK methods, offering a taxonomy and benchmark that highlights the failure of pure learning and the success of hybrid approaches.
This paper provides a unified survey of classical and learning-based methods for singularity avoidance in inverse kinematics, proposing a benchmarking protocol and evaluating 12 IK solvers on the Franka Panda. Results show that pure learning methods fail (MLP: 0% success, ~10 mm mean error), while hybrid warm-start architectures (IKFlow: 59% to 100%, CycleIK: 0% to 98.6%, GGIK: 0% to 100%) rescue learned solvers via classical refinement.
Singular configurations cause loss of task-space mobility, unbounded joint velocities, and solver divergence in inverse kinematics (IK) for serial manipulators. No existing survey bridges classical singularity-robust IK with rapidly growing learning-based approaches. We provide a unified treatment spanning Jacobian regularization, Riemannian manipulability tracking, constrained optimization, and modern data-driven paradigms. A systematic taxonomy classifies methods by retained geometric structure and robustness guarantees (formal vs. empirical). We address a critical evaluation gap by proposing a benchmarking protocol and presenting experimental results: 12 IK solvers are evaluated on the Franka Panda under position-only IK across four complementary panels measuring error degradation by condition number, velocity amplification, out-of-distribution robustness, and computational cost. Results show that pure learning methods fail even on well-conditioned targets (MLP: 0% success, approx. 10 mm mean error), while hybrid warm-start architectures - IKFlow (59% to 100%), CycleIK(0% to 98.6%), GGIK (0% to 100%) - rescue learned solvers via classical refinement, with DLS converging from initial errors up to 207 mm. Deeper singularity-regime evaluation is identified as immediate future work.