Distributed formation control for manipulator end-effectors
This addresses formation control for robotic manipulators in scenarios with uncertain parameters, though it appears incremental as it extends existing methods to handle parameter variations.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling multiple manipulator end-effectors to achieve and maintain 2D/3D formations under varying parameter knowledge, presenting three distributed controller classes. Simulation results with planar and seven-degree-of-freedom humanoid manipulators demonstrate the approach's effectiveness.
We present three classes of distributed formation controllers for achieving and maintaining the 2D/3D formation shape of manipulator end-effectors to cope with different scenarios due to availability of modeling parameters. We firstly present a distributed formation controller for manipulators whose system parameters are perfectly known. The formation control objective is achieved by assigning virtual springs between end-effectors and by adding damping terms at joints, which provides a clear physical interpretation of the proposed solution. Subsequently, we extend it to the case where manipulator kinematic and system parameters are not exactly known. An extra integrator and an adaptive estimator are introduced for gravitational compensation and stabilization, respectively. Simulation results with planar manipulators and with seven degree-of-freedom humanoid manipulator arms are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.