This is the author’s doctoral thesis, carried out under the guidance of Norman Badler. The thesis investigates problems of the sort:
(1) Given a goal specification, how can a linkage be positioned to achieve it?
(2) What is the locus of points the linkage’s tip can reach?
The assumed domain of discourse is human modeling and movement simulation. Accordingly, the linkages involve redundance, spherical joints, and joint limits. Hopcroft and his colleagues have also worked on similar problems, but from the viewpoint of computational complexity (see, for example, [1] and [2]). Clearly, Korein’s work is applied and more oriented toward practical robotics.
Problem (1) above is known as the Cartesian Positioning (or Inverse Kinematics) problem. Korein first develops a position-only solution and then uses it to solve the general problem for anthropomorphic arms with one degree of redundancy.
Problem (2) is known as Workspace Generation. Korein’s solution involves “sweeping” workspaces to obtain larger workspaces. The method generates points on the workspace boundary by sweeping successive joints through their respective ranges of motion.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It is very well written. The author mentions excellent research problems for the interested reader. The figures are beautiful and complement the text nicely. There is a long list of references which should prove useful for a researcher investigating this idea.
I congratulate the author for writing such a lucid and innovative thesis. It is recommended to researchers in the robotics and computational geometry areas.
