Experimental Verification of Dual Arm Controller Performance

A dual arm robotic testbed has been developed for the purpose of general dual arm research. Two industrial manipulators with multiprocessor control systems are coordinated through an intermediate multiprocessor controller. The intermediate controller generates path information for each of the arms, which are under compliant control. The testbed has been used to successfully demonstrate a variety of dual arm tasks. A procedure has been developed for the analysis of the performance of this system. This procedure relies on the formulation of the system dynamic equations in the so-called operational space. Using this formulation, manipulator compensation can be designed and analyzed with respect to task requirements.