Towards Piecewise-Linear Primal Neural Networks for Optimization and Redundant Robotics

Motivated by handling joint physical limits, environmental obstacles and various performance indices, researchers have developed a general quadratic-programming (QP) formulation for the redundancy resolution of robot manipulators. Such a general QP formulation is subject to equality constraint, inequality constraint and bound constraint, simultaneously. Each of the constraints has interpretably physical meaning and utility. Motivated by the real-time solution to the robotic problems, dynamic system solvers in the form of recurrent neural networks (RNN) have been developed and employed. This is in light of their parallel-computing nature and hardware implementability. In this paper, we have reviewed five RNN models, which include state-of-the-art dual neural networks (DNN) and LVI-based primal-dual neural networks (LVI-PDNN). Based on the review of the design experience, this paper proposes the concept, requirement and possibility of developing a future recurrent neural network model for solving online QP problems in redundant robotics; i.e., a piecewise-linear primal neural network