A kinematic criterion for the design optimization of robot manipulators

Abstract

A dexterity measure for the design evaluation and optimization of robot (redundant) manipulators is presented. It is shown that an upper bound for the condition number of the Jacobian matrix depends significantly on this measure. The proposed criterion has been applied (in an absolute fashion) to evaluate the kinematic dexterity and optimize each one of five different designs of a HERA arm as a redundant manipulator to be used in space operations.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>