For a redundant manipulator a region in its workspace that is guaranteed failure tolerant, called the failuretolerant workspace, promises completion of critical tasks placed within it. By judiciously choosing a set of artificial joint limits which constrain the acceptable robot configurations prior to a failure, a failuretolerant workspace can possibly exist even for manipulators with a single degree of redundancy. This work identifies the candidate boundaries of failure-tolerant workspaces, and presents justification on their validity and completeness. Based on the identified boundaries, optimization results for a 3-degreeof- freedom (dof) planar manipulator, as well as for a 4-dof planar manipulator, are presented. It assumed that the manipulator has the ability to lock a joint that has failed, and that the manipulator’s workspace degree of freedom remains the same before and after a joint failure.
Email Address: rodrigo.jamisola@dlsu.edu.ph