A Purely-Reactive Manipulability-Maximising Motion Controller
This addresses motion control challenges for robotics, particularly in real-time applications, though it appears incremental by building on existing manipulability and joint limit avoidance concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling robot end-effector velocity to maximize manipulability and avoid joint limits, achieving this through a quadratic programming approach that works for both non-redundant and redundant robots with solutions in milliseconds.
We present a novel approach to controlling the instantaneous velocity of a robot end-effector that is able to simultaneously maximise manipulability and avoid joint limits. It operates on non-redundant and redundant robots, which is achieved by adding artificial redundancy in the form of controlled path deviation. We formulate the problem as a quadratic programme and provide an open-source Python implementation that provides solutions in just a few milliseconds. It accepts a robot model expressed using URDF or Denavit-Hartenberg parameterisation. We compare our method to previous work in simulation and on a physical robot.