Exploiting Redundancy in Minimum-Time Path Following Robot Control

In this paper we present some preliminary results on exploiting redundancy to reduce the execution time of a task space path for a redundant arm. This is done by suitably introducing a suitable constraint in the inverse kinematic problem that is underlain the minimum-time path following control problem. The proposed constraint is to maximize the intersection of the tangent vector to the task space path with the surface of the dynamic manipulability ellipsoid in order to better exploit the acceleration/deceleration capabilities of the arm. Numerical results are presented for a three degree-of-freedom planar manipulator executing two dimensional paths which show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.