In this paper the singular configurations of wrist-partitioned 6R serial robots in general, and the KUKA KR-15/2 industrial robot in particular, are analytically described and classified. While the results are not new, the insight provided by the geometric analysis for users of such robots is. Examining the problem in the joint axis parameter space, it is shown that when the end-effector reference point is taken to be the wrist centre the determinant of the associated Jacobian matrix splits into four factors, three of which can vanish. Two of the three potentially vanishing factors give a complete description of the positioning singularities and the remaining one a complete description of the orientation singularities, in turn providing a classification scheme.
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