Extended impedance control of redundant manipulators based on weighted decomposition of joint space

Abstract

In this work, impedance control approach based on an extended task space formulation is addressed to control the kinematically redundant manipulators. By defining a weighted inner product in joint space, a minimal parameterization of the null space is achieved, and we can visualize the null space motion explicitly. Moreover, it is shown that careful choice of the weighting matrix gives physically consistent and inertially decoupled dynamics. By augmenting this minimal null motion parameter with a forward kinematic relation, a new extended task space formulation can be obtained. Based on this formulation, we propose two control methods, a kinematically decomposed impedance controller and an inertially decoupled impedance controller, to control the motion of the end-effector as well as the internal motion expanding the conventional impedance control. We also show the relationship with the previous dynamic controllers of a redundant manipulator. Some numerical simulations are given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed control methods. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.