Task decoupling in robot manipulators

Task decoupling in robotic manipulators implies that there is a subset of joints primarily responsible for the completion of a subset of the manipulator task. In this paper, we take a novel and general view of task decoupling in which we identify link subsystems primarily responsible for completion of a subset of the manipulator task components, which is not necessarily position or orientation. Our analysis leads to the discovery of other decoupled manipulator geometries never identified before, wherein the decoupled system is responsible for a subset of degress-of-freedom involving a hybrid combination of both position and orientation. Closed-form inverse kinematic solutions for these manipulator geometries are therefore guaranteed. Task decoupling also implied singularity decoupling wherein singularities of decoupled subsystems are equivalent to the manipulator singularities. The analysis leads to a novel and efficient method for identifying the singularities and solving the inverse kinematics problem of six-axes manipulators with decoupled geometries. The practicality of the concepts introduced is demonstrated through an industrial robot example involving a hybrid position and orientation decoupling.