1. Morphology

1.1 Mechanism graph

To describe the topology of the mechanism making up the robot manipulator, we associate it with a graph whose vertices are the constituent bodies and whose arcs represent the connections between these bodies. Two extreme bodies have particular roles:

• the base, which is fixed to the ground or to a vehicle;

• the terminal organ that carries the tool (or end-effector).

From the base to the end-effector, we can distinguish :

• serial...