A dynamic approach to real-time obstacle avoidance control of redundant manipulators

Kinematically redundant manipulators possess a number of advantages over conventional manipulators, including superior performance with respect to workspace obstacles and mechanism singularities. These manipulators also have the potential for providing better dynamic performance than the current manipulators. This paper presents a very efficient means of including dynamic effects in the obstacle avoidance control of redundant manipulators. The approaches are based on the decomposition technique, in which a manipulator with high redundancy is first decomposed into nonredundant systems (and/or subredundant ones with only one or two degrees of redundancy) and each of these is analyzed using a well-defined Jacobian matrix taking into account obstacle avoidance and manipulator dynamics, thus constructing a set of possible solutions for obstacle avoidance. Numerical simulations were performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.