Optimal trajectory planning for cooperative control of dual-arm robot

This paper proposes a cooperative control algorithm for a dual-arms robot which is carrying an object to the desired location. When the dual-arms robot is carrying an object from the start to the goal point, the optimal path in terms of safety, energy, and time needs to be selected among the numerous possible paths. In order to quantify the carrying efficiency of dual-arms, DAMM (Dual Arm Manipulability Measure) has been defined and applied for the decision of the optimal path. The DAMM is defined as the intersection of the manipulability ellipsoids of the dual-arms, while the manipulability measure indicates a relationship between the joint velocity and the Cartesian velocity for each arm. The cost function for achieving the optimal path is defined as the summation of the distance to the goal and inverse of this DAMM, which aims to generate the efficient motion to the goal. It is confirmed that the optimal path planning keeps higher manipulability through the short distance path by using computer simulation. To show the effectiveness of this cooperative control algorithm experimentally, a 5-DOF dual-arm robot with distributed controllers for synchronization control has been developed and used for the experiments. © ICROS 2010.