In the control of robot manipulators, it is customary to assume that t
he eigenvalues of the inertia matrix are uniformly bounded from below
and above. However, in this article it is shown that not all manipulat
ors possess this property. The class of serial robot manipulators with
bounded inertia matrix, referred to as class BD manipulators, is comp
letely characterized and it is shown that it includes manipulators wit
h nontrivial joint configurations. For manipulators of this class, eas
ily computable uniform bounds for the minimum and maximum eigenvalues
of the inertia matrix are provided. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.