A new general formalism for the kinematic analysis of all nonredundant manipulators

The author presents a novel general formalism for analyzing the kinematics of robot manipulators with arbitrary nonredundant geometry. It is shown that the classical description of singularities in the joint space may become insufficient. The notion of characteristic surfaces which define a new partition of the joint space is introduced. Generalizing the motion of aspects and c-sheets, the characteristic surfaces permit characterization of the joint space uniqueness domains, in which there is one unique solution to the inverse kinematic problem. The mapping into the workspace of the uniqueness domains defines the regions of feasible continuous trajectories