Reconfigurable fault tolerant space manipulator design

This paper defines in kinematics the property of fault tolerant manipulators, the order of fault tolerant manipulators, general fault tolerant manipulators and task specific fault tolerant manipulators. It is constructively proved that adding more redundant degree of freedom is very useful to enhance the reliability of manipulator systems. The degree of freedom of fault tolerant manipulators and the method of designing manipulators under different task restrictions are also shown. A general planar position first order fault tolerant manipulator, a general space position first order fault tolerant manipulator and a task specific planar position first order fault tolerant manipulator are designed. All these are under the precondition of turning workspace to representative points, constructing penalty function and selecting appropriate optimization method. So a successful method of designing fault tolerant manipulators is set up, it is very important to space robot research.