A Dexterity Measure for the Kinematic Control of Robot Manipulator with Redundancy

We have derived a new performance measure, product of minors of the Jacobian matrix, that tells how far kinematically redundant manipulators are from singularity. It was demonstrated that previously used performance measures, namely condition number and manipulability measure allowed to change configurations, causing repeatability problems and discontinuity effects. The new measure, on the other hand, assures that the arm solution remains in the same configuration, thus effectively preventing these problems. Keywords: Systems approach.