Correlation of Singularity Analyses Based on Position and Velocity Kinematics

Abstract

Singularity analyses of manipulators are performed with great concern to avoid singular configurations in which the driving motors and related hardware may face great difficulty to drive the manipulator joints further or the manipulator itself may become uncontrollable in certain regions. Position and velocity kinematics are common practices for singularity analyses. Both the kinematics serve two different purposes. Position kinematics directly proposes the singularity manifold as well as the assembly configurations. On the other hand, velocity kinematics very easily finds a singular configuration. The present research proposes a unique procedure to correlate these two methods. Inverse kinematics in case of serial manipulators and forward kinematics for parallel manipulators act as a bridge between two different singularity analyses approaches. The fact was established with relevant examples of 2-link 2-R planar serial manipulator, 3-link 3-R spatial serial manipulator and 4-bar linkage