degrees of freedom (robotics)

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In robotics the term degrees of freedom refers to the total number of possible movements including rotations of joints, stretching of limbs and clasping modes of hands. For example, in the simple limb in the figure there are two rotational dgrees of freedom for the arm, one in-out degree of freedom and rotation and grasp degrees of freedom for the grip at the end leading to five degrees of freedom in total.

Used on Chap. 15: pages 356, 362