Dexterity measures for design and control of manipulators

Abstract

The authors investigate dexterity measures of a manipulator based on its Jacobian matrix. The goal is to derive dexterity measures which can be used for both design and control of a manipulator. Generally, a dexterity measure must be independent of the scale of a manipulator for design, and must be expressed analytically so that it can be used for real-time control. Every dexterity measure must bear a physical meaning. The measure of manipulability has an analytical expression, but it depends on the scale of a manipulator. On the other hand, the condition number is independent of the scale, but cannot be expressed analytically. These two main problems (scale dependency and analytical expression) of previous dexterity measures derived from the Jacobian matrix are solved and applied in design and control of manipulators. In addition, a dexterity measure called the measure of isotropy is introduced. >