The Design of Isotropic Manipulator Architectures in the Presence of Redundancies

Abstract

The design of redundant isotropic architectures for robotic nia nipulators is the subject of this article. A manipulator is said to have a redundant isotropic architecture if (1) its number of controlled axes is greater than the dimension of its task space. and (2) it is possible for the manipulator to attain configura tions at which all the singular values of its Jacobian matrix are identical and nonzero. The concept of isotropy, which has already been applied to the design of nonredundant manip ulators, is applied to the design of redundant ones. General geometric conditions on the manipulator parameters and on its configuration variables under which isotropy is attained are derived.