Control of Redundant Mechanical Systems Under Equality and Inequality Constraints on Both Input and Constraint Forces

The equality and inequality constraints on constraint force and/or the actuator force/torque arise in several robotic applications, for which different controllers have been specifically developed. This paper presents a unified approach to control a rather general class of robotic systems with closed loops under a set of linear equality and inequality constraints using the notion of projection operator. The controller does not require the kinematic constraints to be independent, i.e., systems with time-varying topology can be dealt with, while demanding minimum-norm actuation force or torque in the case that the system becomes redundant. The orthogonal decomposition of the control input force yields the null-space component and its orthogonal complement. The null-space component is obtained using the projected inverse dynamics control law, while the orthogonal complement component is found through solving a quadratic programming problem, in which the equality and inequality constraints are derived to be equivalent to the originally specified ones. Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate how the control technique can be applied to multi-arms manipulation of an object. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4002689]