Kinematic inversion of functionally-redundant serial manipulators: Application to arc-welding

This paper introduces the concept of functional redundancy of serial manipulators, and presents a new resolution scheme to solve such redundant robotic tasks requiring less than six degrees-of-freedom. Instead of projecting the secondary task onto the null space of the Jacobian matrix in order to take advantage of the redundancy, the twist of end-effector is directly decomposes into two orthogonal subspaces where the main and secondary tasks lie, respectively. The algorithm has shown to be computationally efficient and well suited to solve functionally-redundant robotic tasks, such as arc-welding.