• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.97-108
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• 1996

Optimal design of fault-tolerant, spatial type redundant manipulators is treated in this paper. Design objective is to guarantte three degree-of -freedom translational motions in the task space, upon failure of one arbitrary joint of 4 degree-of-freedom manipulators. Noticing the nonfault-tolerant characteristics of current, wrist-type industrial manipulators, five different fault-tolerant spatial-type manipulators which have 4 degree-of-freedom structures with one joint redundancy are suggested. Faault-tolerant character-sitics of two redundant manipulators anr investigated based on the analysis of the self-motion and the null-space elements. Finally, in order to maximize the fault-tolerant capability, optimal design is performed for a spatial-type manipulator with respect to the global isotropic index, and the performance enhancement of the optimized case is shown by simulation.