degrees of freedom

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

in robotics and mechanical engineering, the number of independent parameters — joint angles, linear displacements — that fully describe the configuration of a mechanism or the pose of a rigid body in space; a free rigid body in three-dimensional space has six degrees of freedom — three translational (x, y, z position) and three rotational (roll, pitch, yaw); a robot manipulator's degrees of freedom equals the number of its actuated joints — a 6-DOF arm can in principle achieve any position and orientation within its workspace; redundant manipulators with more than six DOF offer additional flexibility for avoiding obstacles and joint limits; the term also appears in statistics, where degrees of freedom refers to the number of independent observations in a dataset available for estimating parameters, equal to sample size minus the number of parameters estimated

Examples

• A human arm has approximately seven degrees of freedom — shoulder (3), elbow (1), and wrist (3) — making it highly dexterous.
• Adding a seventh degree of freedom to the robot arm gave it the redundancy to reach around obstacles while maintaining the tool's position.

Synonyms: DOF