Hardware

Wrist Configuration

A wrist configuration is the arrangement of the distal joints of a manipulator that orient the end effector, most commonly a three-axis wrist. A spherical wrist, whose three revolute axes intersect at a single point, decouples position from orientation and admits closed-form inverse kinematics by Pieper's condition; offset (non-spherical) wrists avoid the mechanical complexity of intersecting axes but generally require numerical IK.

Why it matters for physical AI

Wrist geometry sets how a robot approaches grasps in clutter, where its orientation singularities fall, and whether inverse kinematics is fast and exact, all of which surface as hard constraints on manipulation policies.