Geometry of General Serial Robots

Abstract

Current serial robots, encountered not only in research laboratories but also in production or construction environments, include features that deserve a chapter apart. We will call here general serial robots all non-redundant serial robots that do not fall in the category of those studied in Chap. 4. Thus, the chapter is devoted to manipulators of the serial type that do not allow a decoupling of the positioning and the orientation problems. The focus of the chapter is, thus, the inverse displacement problem (IDP) of general six-revolute robots. While redundant manipulators of the serial type fall within this category as well, we will leave these aside, for their redundancy resolution calls for a more specialized background than what we have either assumed or given here.