6-Axis Robot Arm

A robot arm with six rotating joints in series, able to reach any position and orientation.

A 6-axis robot arm is built from six rotating joints connected in series, the most common configuration for industrial and collaborative robot arms. An object's pose in space, meaning its x/y/z position plus three rotation angles, has exactly 6 degrees of freedom, so six joints are, in principle, enough for the end effector, such as a gripper or welding torch mounted on the wrist, to reach any pose within the workspace. A common design puts the first three axes at the base to set position and the last three in a spherical wrist to set orientation, which is why most 6-axis arms have a closed-form solution for inverse kinematics, meaning computing joint angles from a target pose. Representative products include the UR5e, xArm6, and AgileX PiPER; in embodied-AI research it is often used as a single-arm manipulation platform. Lacking a redundant joint, it is less flexible than a 7-DoF arm when facing singular configurations or needing to reach around obstacles.

ExampleThe UR5e is a 6-axis collaborative arm with a 5 kg payload, commonly used for pick-and-place experiments.

Also called

6-DoF Robot Arm, Six-Axis Robot Arm

Related

Robotic Arm · Degrees of Freedom (DoF) · Inverse Kinematics (IK) · Spherical Wrist · 7-DoF Robot Arm · Universal Robots UR5e

Sources

Robotic arm - Wikipedia
Universal Robots UR5e