On the uniform boundedness of the inertia matrix of serial robot manipulators

In the control of robot manipulators, it is customary to assume that the eigenvalues of the inertia matrix are uniformly bounded from below and above. However, in this article it is shown that not all manipulators possess this property. The class of serial robot manipulators with bounded inertia matrix, referred to as class B D manipulators, is completely characterized and it is shown that it includes manipulators with nontrivial joint configurations. For manipulators of this class, easily computable uniform bounds for the minimum and maximum eigenvalues of the inertia matrix are provided. Q 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.