Investigation of Cyclicity of Kinematic Resolution Methods for Serial and Parallel Planar Manipulators

Kinematic redundancy of manipulators is a well-understood topic, and various methods were developed for the redundancy resolution in order to solve the inverse kinematics problem, at least for serial manipulators. An important question, with high practical relevance, is whether the inverse kinematics solution is cyclic, i.e., whether the redundancy solution leads to a closed path in joint space as a solution of a closed path in task space. This paper investigates the cyclicity property of two widely used redundancy resolution methods, namely the projected gradient method (PGM) and the augmented Jacobian method (AJM), by means of examples. Both methods determine solutions that minimize an objective function, and from an application point of view, the sensitivity of the methods on the initial configuration is crucial. Numerical results are reported for redundant serial robotic arms and for redundant parallel kinematic manipulators. While the AJM is known to be cyclic, it turns out that also the PGM exhibits cyclicity. However, only the PGM converges to the local optimum of the objective function when starting from an initial configuration of the cyclic trajectory.