FABRIK Inverse Kinematics in 3D with AL5D Arm

FABRIK with Caliko works great for inverse kinematics in 3D as well!  It took me a long time to determine the proper constraint on the first bone (a pan table) to rotate only.  Not sure if I did it the "correct way", but it works anyhow.

I cannot recommend trying the Caliko visualization with GLFW unless you are a GLFW expert.  I spent a long time trying to get it to compile on Eclipse and run without any success.  Lots of combinations of OpenGL and GFLW and Java that can go wrong.   Thus I gave up and used Caliko to output the arm positions in text for input into good old Python with matplotlib.

I'll note that I am modeling my AL5D arm without the wrist & gripper connection.  This is because for my use case of playing chess, I want the wrist to always point down, and I've added some tongs to the gripper to reach between the chess pieces to grab them from above without knocking down other chess pieces.  So I am only modeling the pan base and the first two hinged "bones" and looking at a target that is 140mm above the chess board.

Here are some results of the IK calculations with FABRIK via Caliko.  Note that even in the last case where the arm cannot reach the target, it at least "reaches out towards it", which is better than the algorithm crashing or returning NaN...

Here is the Caliko code:

And here is the Python plotting code: