Optimizing the tasks at hand [robotic manipulators]

This article addresses the kinematic synthesis of robotic manipulators and presents a simple prototyping software tool. The tool, which runs under the mathematica environment, automatically computes possible optimal parameters of robot arms by applying numerical optimization techniques to the manipulability function, combined with distances to the targets and restrictions on the dimensions of the robot. This work also discusses possible extensions of the proposed method of kinematic synthesis.