Manipulability Analysis of Redundant Robotic Manipulator

Abstract

The increased number of applications of the robotic systems in the human life leads to the need of assigning more complex tasks to such systems. The redundancy of the robotic configuration increases performance and precision of the execution of the assigned tasks. This paper proposes the analysis of characteristics such as service angle and manipulability coefficient as an important step of the robotic systems design. It takes into consideration a joint angle constrained planar robotic manipulator. The considered robot has kinematically redundant configuration with respect to planar motion within its workspace. The research evaluates the manipulability coefficient and the service angle values for each point of its workspace. Through this evaluation the joint angles with the highest manipulability can be found. It graphically represents the results from conducted experiments. Those results give information about the zones of the workspace for which the robot is able to achieve higher joint velocities and its performance will be better. The experiments confirm that the manipulability analysis can show whether the selected configuration is applicable for the task, which will be assigned to the robot. They also illustrate the optimal joint angle configuration for selected positions of the end-effector.