Abstract
A probabilistic approach to robot kinematics is presented and the concept of manipulator reliability is introduced to obtain a better evaluation of the performance of manipulators. Techniques are presented to compute this reliability and its relationship to the geometric parameters such as tolerances and arm configuration are discussed. The aspects of accuracy and repeatability of manipulators are explained in terms of manipulator reliability. The reliability of a two-link planar manipulator and the Stanford arm are considered for numerical illustration.
