Introduction

Abstract

Kinematic redundancy describes a manipulator’s topological property of featuring more joints than necessary to assume any configuration in its task space of given dimension. Figure 1.1 illustrates a planar robot with three joints. Since only the horizontal and the vertical position coordinates of the end-effector but not its orientation are selected to be task space coordinates, the manipulator is kinematically redundant. Similarly, the industrial robot from Figure 1.2 consists of a manipulator with six revolute joints on top of a linear axis which also results in the robot being kinematically redundant since the end-effector pose can be described by means of three coordinates each for its position and for its orientation.