Dynamic force/motion control of cooperative robot systems

A new approach to designing a dynamic controller for multiple cooperating robotic manipulators is presented. A suitable kineto-static formulation for multi-arm systems provides an effective framework to analyze the coordination problem. This gives a global task space description of external and internal forces and, dually, absolute and relative velocities. The objective is to control absolute motion of the object held by the two arms and internal forces acting on the object. Differently from earlier works aimed at designing static controllers, the scheme here proposed does take into account the multiple arm dynamics. A nonlinear action is designed first to compensate for the dynamic terms which decouples the system. Then a linear action achieves prescribed force/motion behavior.