SUMMARYThe significance of singularities in the design and control of robot manipulators is well known, and there is an extensive literature on the determination and analysis of singularities for a wide variety of serial and parallel manipulators—indeed such an analysis is an essential part of manipulator design. Singularity theory provides methodologies for a deeper analysis with the aim of classifying singularities, providing local models and local and global invariants. This paper surveys applications of singularity-theoretic methods in robot kinematics and presents some new results.
Let E(n) be the Lie group of proper rigid motions of Euclidean n-space. The paper is concerned with the adjoint action of E(n) on its Lie algebra e(n), and the induced action on the Grassmannian of subspaces of e(n) of a given dimension. For the adjoint action, the authors list explicit generators for the ring of invariant polynomials. In the case n = 3, of greatest physical interest, explicit finite invariant stratifications are given for the Grassmannians, providing a formal listing of the screw-systems familiar in theoretical kinematics.
Checking the regularity of the inverse jacobian matrix of a parallel robot is an essential element for the safe use of this type of mechanism. Ideally such check should be made for all poses of the useful workspace of the robot or for any pose along a given trajectory and should take into account the uncertainties in the robot modeling and control. We propose various methods that facilitate this check. We exhibit especially a sufficient condition for the regularity that is directly related to the extreme poses that can be reached by the robot.
The motion of a rigid body in a Euclidean space E n is represented by a path in the Euclidean isometry group E(n). A normal form for elements of the Lie algebra of this group leads to a stratification of the algebra which is shown to be Whitney regular. Translating this along invariant vector fields give rise to a stratification of the jet bundles Jk(R, E(n)) for k = 1, 2 and, hence, via the transversality theorem, to generic properties of rigid body motions. The relation of these to the classical centrodes and axodes of motions is described, together with applications to planar 4-bar mechanisms and the dynamics of a rigid body.
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