Fault tolerant properties of kinematically redundant manipulators

Abstract

The dexterity of kinematically redundant manipulators has been quantified and utilized for satisfying a variety of performance criteria. In this work, the degradation of dexterity due to a joint failure is analyzed. A definition of fault tolerance based on a worst-case measure of the remaining dexterity is presented and the properties of optimal fault tolerant configurations are discussed.