Quantifying the local fault tolerance of a kinematically redundant manipulator

Abstract

There are a variety of kinematic performance measures for quantifying the dexterity and manipulability of a robotic system. Such measures can be used for identifying optimal operating configurations and for evaluating manipulator designs. In this work some of these metrics are modified to measure the local fault tolerance of a kinematically redundant manipulator to a joint failure. While many dexterity measures are functions of only the singular values of the manipulator Jacobian, these new measures clearly indicate the relationship between local fault tolerance and the null space of the manipulator Jacobian.