Criteria for determining an optimum locality of a manipulator arm is developed. Often times in a manufacturing environment, the tools, fixtures, and targets that a manipulator has to deal with cannot be relocated. Thus, the choice of the manipulator locality is important. The method presented in this paper uses the notion of a service sphere to determine required orientability at an operating
... [Show full abstract] point. The boundary surfaces to the wrist-accessible output set is determined and positioned such that the service sphere is inside the wrist-accessible output set. To determine boundary surfaces of the wrist-accessible output set, manipulator singularities (internal, boundary, and higher order) are computed and substituted into the constraint equation to parametrize singular surfaces. Part of these surfaces may lie internal to the boundary while other parts are a subset of the boundary. Singular surfaces are then intersected to determine second-order singularities. Second-order singularities part...
