Singularity Configurations Investigation of FANUC LR MATE 200ID Arm Manipulator

Singularity is a fundamental issue with robot manipulators. The presence of singularities can extremely affect the manipulator's performance. The kinematic singularities analysis is an essential stage in manipulator design. When a manipulator is approaching a singular configuration, its degrees of freedom will reduce such that there are no feasible solutions to move into this singular direction. This paper presents a method to investigate the singularity regions analytically of a 6DOF industrial robot in particular. The singularity directions in task space for robot are clearly identified using determinant of the robot's Jacobian matrix. Manipulator singularities are decoupled into the forearm and the wrist singularities. This approach is illustrated and verified experimentally on FANUC LR MATE 200ID robot arm.