Design of dynamic control of two cooperating robot arms: Closed chain formulation

In this paper the dynamic equation describing two cooperating robot arms which simultaneously are working on the same object is established by considering the whole system as a closed kinematic chain. This formulation has the advantage of automatically handling the coordination and load distribution between the robot arms through the dynamic equation. It can also be generalized to a multi-robot arm system. The control problem is solved as a design problem for a linear system by first applying a nonlinear feedback and nonlinear coordinate transformation to linearize the nonlinear dynamic equation, and then employing the linear optimal control theory to design a robust controller in the task space. This new dynamic control method establishes a direct control response to task space commands facilitating dynamics based task encoding in robotics.