Convex hull-based power manipulability analysis of robot manipulators

This paper presents the convex hull-based power manipulability analysis of robot manipulators. Since the manipulability analysis is essential for the design and performance evaluation of robot manipulators, many researchers have focused on the well-known manipulability ellipsoid and polytope based on the Jacobian analysis to investigate the corresponding information. In spite of the good reputation of the manipulability ellipsoid, it does not provide the adequate information about how fast the manipulators can move along arbitrary direction, and the manipulability polytope also suffers from a physical inconsistency which arise when position and orientation information are combined into a single scalar performance parameter. To overcome the drawback of the physical inconsistency, the power manipulability ellipsoid has been suggested based on a new parameter which does not depend on the physical unit choice of mechanisms [1]. However, it still has the same drawback as the manipulability ellipsoid. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop the convex hull-based power manipulability in order to provide the adequate information with the physical consistency. The proposed approach is applied to a 2-DOF serial manipulator and a 3-DOF planar parallel manipulator by comparing the ellipsoid approach and the polytope one.