When a redundant robot performs a fault-tolerant operation for locked joint failures, its fault tolerant properties should include dexterity and sudden change of joint velocity at the moment of locking failed joints and the dexterity during the post-failure. Firstly three fault-tolerant indexes, reduced condition number, sudden change of relative joint velocity and centrality are proposed, which can comprehensively evaluate the kinematical performance of a redundant robot during its entire fault-tolerant operations. Then, the influence of the initial postures of robot's end-effector on these fault-tolerant indexes is analyzed with a planar robot and a spatial robot. Simulation results show that for a given task the joint trajectory with the best comprehensive effect of fault tolerance can be determined by optimizing the initial posture of a robot.
