Preface
Notation
List of Figures
1 Introduction
1.1 Historical Context
1.2 Assumptions and Scope
1.3 Reader?s Guide
2 Singularity Types
2.1 Forward and Inverse Singularities
2.2 A Geometric Interpretation of Singularities
2.3 Lower-level Singularity Types
2.4 A Simple Mechanism with All Singularities
3 Numerical Computation of Singularity Sets
3.1 A Suitable Approach
3.2 Formulating the Equations of the Singularity Set
3.3 Isolating the Singularity Set
3.4 Visualising the Singularity Sets
3.5 Case Studies
4 Workspace Determination
4.1 The Need of a General Method
4.2 The Workspace and its Boundaries
4.3 Issues of Continuation Methods
4.4 Exploiting the Branch-and-Prune Machinery
4.5 Case Studies
5 Singularity-free Path Planning
5.1 Related Work
5.2 Formulating the Singularity-free C-space
5.3 Exploring the Singularity-free C-space
5.4 Case Studies
6 Planning with Further Constraints
6.1 Wrench-Feasibility Constraints
6.2 The Planning Problem
6.3 Proofs of the Properties
6.4 Case Studies
6.5 Details about the Wrench Ellipsoid
6.6 Extensions
7 Conclusions
7.1 Summary of Results
7.2 Future Research Directions
References
Index
Author Index. .