Constructing performance measures for constrained systems

Investigates the construction of performance measures for robot manipulators with closed kinematic loops. For such systems, the equations for the forward kinematics and the constraints can not be solved explicitly in general. The authors extend a formalism introduced by them previously (1993, 1994) based on the construction of an “induced” metric tensor on the work space of the manipulator, to include systems with constraints (which may be non-holonomic). As an example of an application the authors compute the generalized Yoshikawa measure for a planar five-link closed linkage chain, which they use to compute some optimal postures