Planning Fail-Safe Trajectories for Space Robotic Arms

A frequent concern for robot manipulators deployed in dangerous and hazardous environments for humans is the reliability of task executions in the event of a joint failure. A redundant robotic manipulator can be used to mitigate the risk and guarantee a post-failure task completion, which is critical for instance for space applications. This paper describes methods to analyze potential risks due to a joint failure, and introduces tools for fault-tolerant task design and path planning for robotic manipulators. The presented methods are based on off-line precomputed workspace models. The methods are general enough to cope with robots with any type of joint (revolute or prismatic) and any number of degrees of freedom, and might include arbitrarily shaped obstacles in the process, without resorting to simplified models. Application examples illustrate the potential of the approach.