Abstract
In this paper, we suggest to apply artificial nonholonomic mechanical constraints to master-slave manipulation systems, so that the slave system can be operated by a dissimilar master system with relatively less numbers of degree-of-freedom. The cost for this reduction of degree-of-freedom, in general, should be compensated by skillful (or temporally complicated) operation of the master system. For this purpose, we propose an extended definition of manipulability considering the nature of small-time controllability of nonholonomic systems, and derive its numerical analysis as well. The proposed approach is illustrated with numerical simulations.
