This master's thesis presents a novel approach to finding trajectories with minimal end time
for kinematically redundant manipulators. Emphasis is given to a general applicability of the
developed method to industrial tasks such as gluing or welding. Minimum-time trajectories may
yield economic advantages as a shorter trajectory duration results in a lower task cycle time.
Whereas kinematically redundant manipulators possess increased dexterity compared to
conventional non-redundant manipulators their inverse kinematics is not unique and requires
further treatment. In this work a joint space decomposition approach is introduced that takes
advantage of the closed form inverse kinematics solution of non-redundant robots. Kinematic
redundancy can be fully exploited to achieve minimum-time trajectories for prescribed
end-effector paths.
