A genetic methodology for reachability evaluation of manipulators

In the process of manipulator design, reachability is an essential constrained condition. Because determining reachable position/orientation workspace is very difficult and reachability evaluation is very complicated. According to the concept of distance metrics in configuration space, we defined a distance between a target and a workspace by taking into consideration the position and orientation. If the distance is zero the manipulator can reach this target point. Reachability evaluation can be transformed into a high nonlinear optimization problem. A genetic methodology for reachability evaluation of manipulators is presented. The effectiveness and convergence are ascertained by a simulation example.