On the optimal kinematic design of spherical and spatial mechanisms

Abstract

The optimal kinematic design of spherical and spatial mechanisms for dexterity and workspace volume is addressed. The concept of dexterity used is based on the distortion measure of harmonic mappings which is defined in a natural, coordinate-invariant way. The author analyzes the performance of robotic wrists with respect to these kinematic criteria, and determines the optimal link lengths for a simple two-link, 3R spatial open chain. In addition, he compares the kinematic dexterity of three redundant 7R open chains.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>