EVALUATION OF DEXTERITY MEASURES FOR A 3-LINK PLANAR REDUNDANT MANIPULATOR USING CONSTRAINT LOCUS

This paper describes how to evaluate the performance of dexterity meas ures by investigating the properties of the inverse kinematic algorith ms, These algorithms use redundancy to optimize the dexterity measure under the constraint of following a specified end-effector trajectory. To facilitate the investigation, a concept of the constraint locus is proposed. The constraint locus is the loci of configurations satisfyi ng the necessary conditions for optimality of a dexterity measure in t he configuration space, The topological properties of the inverse kine matic algorithm both on the configuration and operation spaces define the invertible workspace without singularities. Using the global prope rties of two dexterity measures, we provide a promising algorithm whic h provides a singular-free and conservative joint trajectory for tasks occupying almost the entire workspace.