In this chapter we survey some of the tools and criteria used in the mechanical design and performance evaluation of robots. Our focus is on robots that are (a) primarily intended for manipulation tasks and (b) constructed with one or more serial kinematic chains. The kinematics of parallel robots is addressed in detail in Chap. 18; their elastostatics is the subject of Sect. 16.5.1. Wheeled robots, walking robots, multifingered hands, and robots intended for outdoor applications, i. e., those encompassing what is known as field robotics, are studied in their own chapters; here we provide an overview of the main classes of these robots as relating to design. |