Interactive-motion control of modular reconfigurable manipulators

A joystick-based interactive motion control approach is proposed for modular reconfigurable manipulators. Based on the product-of-exponentials (POE) formula, the velocity models as well as the incremental displacement models have been formulated for both serial manipulators (with arbitrary configurations and DOFs) and a class of three-legged parallel manipulators. As a result, two different control modes, i.e., the velocity control mode and the incremental displacement control mode, have been developed. A user-friendly GUI has also been developed, which can display the joystick input, the actual joint angles, and the end-effector pose simultaneously. A 6-DOF serial modular robot and a 6-DOF 3RPRS parallel robot have demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach.