Task Description for Two Cooperative Manipulators

The main goal of this paper is to present some solutions we have developed to describe complex tasks that can be achieved by two coordinated manipulators. Task description means definition of controlled vectors. Therefore, it is a necessary step before actually controlling the manipulators. The tasks we present involve either an open kinematic chain or a closed kinematic chain. In both cases, the two manipulators are seen as a single kinematic system. For the open chain case, this approach allows us to fully use the possible redundancy of the system to impose some particular constraint or criterion. For the closed chain case, this concept of a single two-arm robot is used for describing the tasks in the object space, rather than in the manipulators space. This solution appears to be very convenient, from a user point of view. In addition we present some experiments we have done with two real six-axis manipulators. This of course requires implementing some control scheme, on which we haven´t done any particular research, so far. Therefore, we only describe the solutions we are currently utilizing and present some results which are aimed at showing the effectiveness of our task descriptions more than the quality of our control algorithms.