Abstract: Aiming at some robot configurations which can′t be resolved by analytical solution, an inverse kinematics algorithm, in which analytical and numerical solutions are combined, was proposed. This algorithm simplified the previous method to search a suitable object function, and then iteratively solved the one-dimensional joint variable, by which the other joint variables could be derived. The algorithm developed here performed a kinematics inversion of a 5 degree of freedom robot with no closed-form solutions in less than 3 ms using a desktop computer, an order of magnitude faster than the times found in the literature. This method is simple and fast enough to be suitable for real-time manipulator control. This approach does not require computation of the forward kinematics and can be used with manipulators of any geometry, although it is most efficient when applied to orthogonal manipulators.