A singularities prevention approach for redundant robot manipulators

A singularity-prevention approach is presented for redundant robot manipulators. The approach is based on establishing a local sufficiency condition that guarantees the rank preservation of the Jacobian matrix. This condition has been used directly as the constraint in the optimization problem which is formulated to obtain the optimal path of the robot manipulator. From the formulation a closed-form solution is derived and tested in the simulation of a planar redundant manipulator. The results obtained show that the approach compares favorably with methods formulated at the resolved-motion level