Task-Oriented Kinematic Control of Two Cooperative 6-DOF Manipulators

The kinematic control problem for a system of two cooperative 6-dof manipulators is addressed in this paper. First, a kinematic model of the system is obtained which allows a clear description of the task in terms of absolute and relative variables. Then, a suitable inverse kinematics scheme is designed to compute the joint variable trajectories corresponding to a given trajectory for the above cooperative task variables. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated by two case studies for two cooperative PUMA 560 robot manipulators; one regards a typical coordinated motion for the system, the other is aimed at illustrating the redundancy resolution features of the scheme.