A nonalgorithmic method is presented for the solution to the inverse kinematic problem of a robot. The method is robot independent and involves a hybrid approach whereby a neural solution is augmented with an iterative procedure which provides the final solution within some specified tolerance. Essentially, the neural solution is similar to a lookup table in providing a good initial guess to a classical iterative search. It has been found that for the industrial manipulator PUMA 560, the proposed hybrid method achieves about a twofold increase in computational efficiency with better uniformity of the time required to obtain the solution to the robotic manipulator. >