Distributed Control and Coordination Technique for Complex Robotic Systems

The present work deals with complex robotic structures characterized by the presence of an embedded distributed control system. More specifically, every single joint of the kinematic chain is assumed to be equipped with a simple local processing unit for properly driving its motion. As a consequence, each joint and the associated link may be considered as a defective "1-dof only" separately controlled atomic manipulator, which is required to act in team with all the other joints, in order to accomplish a global common task specified in the operational space. In this context the paper proposes a DP-based computationally distributed kinematic inversion technique that, based on a moderate data exchange among the processing units, allows the establishment of a global self-organizing behavior. In this way it becomes possible to execute any motion task by solely exploiting the control capabilities of each local processing unit, while not requiring any centralized knowledge about the overall structure geometry and kinematics