Interaction control of robot manipulators. Six degrees-of-freedom tasks. (Q1421034)

The book is focused on a central problem in robot control, namely to manage the interaction between a robot manipulator and the environment. It is aimed at developing a treatment of the interaction control problem in the general case of a six degrees-of-freedom task foregoing the hypothesis of small displacements. A breakthrough of the work lies in the steps toward the control of cooperative robots interacting with each other and with the working environment. Many applications can draw advantage from the coordination of multiple robots performing the same task, e.g. carrying large or heavy loads, parts mating, assembling. The book can be considered as an attempt at developing a methodology in the task space approach, as a strategy to deal with the problem of interaction of both a single manipulator and multiple robots with the environment. The problem of multiple robot coordination is tackled both at the task planning level and the feedback control level, by resorting to a modular control architecture, very attractive from an industrial point of view. The contents of the monograph are organized as follows. Chapter 1 presents a classification of robotic interaction tasks and makes the key points of the task space approach evident. At the end of the chapter a description of the laboratory setup used to experiment with all the proposed control algorithms is reported. Chapter 2 is devoted to presenting some motion control schemes in the task space, each one corresponding to a different representation of end-effector orientation; they are experimentally compared in terms of performance and computational complexity and constitute the first stage of an interaction controller. A strategy for indirect force control is presented in Chapter 3, where the concept of six degrees-of-freedom impedance is introduced on energy-based arguments and with reference to the particular representation of end-effector orientation. The impedance control scheme is then designed and experimental results are given. The direct force control strategy is developed in Chapter 4, where a parallel approach is pursued to handle the interaction with a scarcely structured environment. The last Chapter 5 is devoted to tackling the problem of controlling a dual-arm robotic system interacting with a compliant environment, and different strategies are presented to deal with the coordination problem. The first Appendix provides the necessary background on rigid body orientation and gives the definition and the main properties of the unit quaternion. The second Appendix gives some notes about real-time implementation of interaction control algorithms for industrial robots. The book is mainly addressed to researchers and scholars who have their first contact with robot control. It can also be adopted as a textbook for a graduate course on advanced robotics.