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Displacements of the base during trajectory tracking are a common issue in the control of aerial manipulators. These are caused by reaction torques transferred to the base due to the manipulator motion and, in particular, to the motion of its center of gravity. We present a novel approach to reduce base displacements of a kinematically redundant aerial manipulator by using null-space projection in the inverse kinematic control. A secondary objective function minimizes the horizontal displacement of the manipulator center of gravity. We test this algorithm on different trajectories for both three and four degrees of freedom (DOF) manipulators in a simulation environment. The results comparing our algorithm with inverse kinematic control without the null-space projection show up to an 80% reduction in the end-effector position error and an average of about 56% reduction in maximum base displacement. The simulation implementation also runs faster than in real-time in our code implementation. We provide a workspace analysis based on multiple stopping criteria such as excessive base displacement, joint velocities and end-effector position error for the 3 and 4 DOF manipulators. As expected, the 4 DOF manipulator has a larger workspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featured Application: Inspection of structures, e.g., offshore/nuclear/eolic plants, bridges, and tall buildings. Placement and retrieval of sensors. Assembly of structures in places not accessible/safe for humans. Aerial manipulators are used in industrial and service robotics tasks such as assembly, inspection, and maintenance. One of the main challenges in aerial manipulation is related to the motion of the UAV base caused by manipulator disturbance torques and forces, which jeopardize the precision of the robot manipulator. In this paper, we propose two novel inverse kinematic control methods used to track a trajectory with an aerial manipulator while also considering resultant UAV base motions. The first method is adapted from the generalized Jacobian formulation used in space robotics and includes the change in system momentum resulting from gravity and UAV control forces in the inverse kinematic control equation. This approach is simulated for a 2 and 3 degree-of-freedom aerial manipulator tracking trajectories with the end-effector. Although the end-effector position error is approximately zero throughout the simulated task, we see significant undesired UAV base motions of several centimeters in magnitude. To ameliorate this by exploiting the kinematic redundancy, we modify the generalized Jacobian by adding an additional task constraint which minimizes the reaction torques from the manipulator, to form the extended generalized Jacobian. While the second approach results in improved precision and reduced base motion by an order of magnitude as compared to the generalized Jacobian, a drawback is the reduction in the available workspace as the solution seeks to minimize the manipulator center of gravity translation. We also demonstrate and compare both approaches in a load picking task. All the algorithms are completed computationally faster than real time in the MATLAB simulations, illustrating their potential for application in real-world experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For targeted motion control tasks of manipulators, it is frequently necessary to make use of full levels of joint actuation to guarantee successful motion planning and path tracking. Such way of motion planning and control may keep the joint actuation in a non-sparse manner during motion control process. In order to improve sparsity of joint actuation for manipulator systems, a novel motion planning scheme which can optimally and sparsely adopt joint actuation is proposed in this brief. The proposed motion planning strategy is formulated as a constrained $L_{1}$ norm optimization problem, and an equivalent enhanced optimization solution dealing with bounded joint velocity is proposed as well. A new primal dual neural network with a new solution set division is further proposed and applied to solve such bounded optimization which can sparsely adopt joint actuation for motion control. Simulation and experiment results demonstrate the efficiency, accuracy and superiority of the proposed method for optimally and sparsely adopting joint actuation. The average sparsity (i.e., - $\|\dot \theta \|_{p}$ where $\theta $ denotes the joint angle) of the joint motion of the manipulator can be increased by 39.22% and 51.30% for path tracking tasks in $X - Y$ and $X - Z$ planes respectively, indicating that the sparsity of joint actuation can be enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Displacements of the base during trajectory tracking are a common issue in the control of aerial manipulators. These are caused by reaction torques transferred to the base due to the manipulator motion and, in particular, to the motion of its center of gravity. We present a novel approach to reduce base displacements of a kinematically redundant aerial manipulator by using null-space projection in the inverse kinematic control. A secondary objective function minimizes the horizontal displacement of the manipulator center of gravity. We test this algorithm on different trajectories for both three and four degrees of freedom (DOF) manipulators in a simulation environment. The results comparing our algorithm with inverse kinematic control without the null-space projection show up to an 80% reduction in the end-effector position error and an average of about 56% reduction in maximum base displacement. The simulation implementation also runs faster than in real-time in our code implementation. We provide a workspace analysis based on multiple stopping criteria such as excessive base displacement, joint velocities and end-effector position error for the 3 and 4 DOF manipulators. As expected, the 4 DOF manipulator has a larger workspace.

Aerial manipulators are used in industrial and service robotics tasks such as assembly, inspection, and maintenance. One of the main challenges in aerial manipulation is related to the motion of the UAV base caused by manipulator disturbance torques and forces, which jeopardize the precision of the robot manipulator. In this paper, we propose two novel inverse kinematic control methods used to track a trajectory with an aerial manipulator while also considering resultant UAV base motions. The first method is adapted from the generalized Jacobian formulation used in space robotics and includes the change in system momentum resulting from gravity and UAV control forces in the inverse kinematic control equation. This approach is simulated for a 2 and 3 degree-of-freedom aerial manipulator tracking trajectories with the end-effector. Although the end-effector position error is approximately zero throughout the simulated task, we see significant undesired UAV base motions of several centimeters in magnitude. To ameliorate this by exploiting the kinematic redundancy, we modify the generalized Jacobian by adding an additional task constraint which minimizes the reaction torques from the manipulator, to form the extended generalized Jacobian. While the second approach results in improved precision and reduced base motion by an order of magnitude as compared to the generalized Jacobian, a drawback is the reduction in the available workspace as the solution seeks to minimize the manipulator center of gravity translation. We also demonstrate and compare both approaches in a load picking task. All the algorithms are completed computationally faster than real time in the MATLAB simulations, illustrating their potential for application in real-world experiments.

Manipulators may often endure large-scale potential energy variations during kinematic control, producing unsafe oscillations of posture-hold effects. In this brief, for the first time, a sparse-optimization-based control method is proposed to simultaneously guarantee task accuracy and reduce potential energy variations for manipulators. The proposed control approach is formulated as an Lp-norm sparse optimization paradigm with the variation of the potential energy as the constraint. Simulation results on the n-link planar manipulator and experiment results on a 6-DoF manipulator system verify the proposed control method for accurate motion control tasks with potential energy minimization, with the average potential energy variations of the manipulators largely diminished with the sparse kinematic resolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most traditional methods for solving the kinematic control problem of redundant manipulators are designed from a signal processing perspective. However, such a perspective may make the resultant design difficult for practitioners to understand. If the problem is addressed from an energy perspective, the resultant design may be more comprehensive, because energy is a universal concept and can be used to describe complex large-scale industrial systems. Passivity is a property of engineering systems, which is characterized through energy transformation. In this paper, a passivity-based approach is proposed for the kinematic control of redundant manipulators, where the joint velocity limit of manipulators is also considered. The performance of the approach is theoretically guaranteed. In addition, simulative examples are presented to validate the efficacy of the approach and the theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the safe operation of redundant manipulators, physical constraints such as the joint angle, joint velocity, and joint acceleration limits should be taken into account when designing redundancy resolution schemes. Velocity-level redundancy resolution schemes are widely adopted in the kinematic control of redundant manipulators due to the existence of the well-tuned inner loop regarding the joint velocity control. However, it is difficult to deal with joint acceleration limits for velocity-level redundancy resolution methods. In this paper, a recurrent-neural-network-based velocity-level redundancy resolution method is proposed to deal with the problem, and theoretical results are given to guarantee its performance. By the proposed method, the end-effector position error is asymptotically convergent to zero, and all the joint limits are not violated. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed scheme are validated via simulation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Redundancy resolution is a critical problem in the control of manipulators. The dual neural network, as a special type of recurrent neural networks that are inherently parallel processing models, is widely investigated in past decades to control manipulators. However, to the best of our knowledge, existing dual neural networks require a full knowledge about manipulator parameters for efficient control. We make progress along this direction in this paper by proposing a novel model-free dual neural network, which is able to address the learning and control of manipulators simultaneously in a unified framework. Different from pure learning problems, the interplay of the control part and the learning part allows us to inject an additive noise into the control channel to increase the richness of signals for the purpose of efficient learning. Due to a deliberate design, the learning error is guaranteed for convergence to zero despite the existence of additive noise for stimulation. Theoretical analysis reveals the global stability of the proposed neural network control system. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme for redundancy resolution of a PUMA 560 manipulator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a distributed scheme is proposed for the cooperative motion generation in a distributed network of multiple redundant manipulators. The proposed scheme can simultaneously achieve the specified primary task to reach global cooperation under limited communications among manipulators and optimality in terms of a specified optimization index of redundant robot manipulators. The proposed distributed scheme is reformulated as a quadratic program (QP). To inherently suppress noises originating from communication interferences or computational errors, a noise-tolerant zeroing neural network (NTZNN) is constructed to solve the QP problem online. Then, theoretical analyses show that, without noise, the proposed distributed scheme is able to execute a given task with exponentially convergent position errors. Moreover, in the presence of noise, the proposed distributed scheme with the aid of NTZNN model has a satisfactory performance. Furthermore, simulations and comparisons based on PUMA560 redundant robot manipulators substantiate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed distributed scheme with the aid of NTZNN model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a neural-dynamic distributed scheme is proposed for the cooperative control of multiple redundant manipulators with limited communications. It is guaranteed that, with the communication network being connected, all manipulators can jointly reach the same desired motion. The proposed distributed scheme is rearranged as a time-varying quadratic program and solved online by a Zhang neural network. Then, theoretical analyses show that, without noise, the proposed distributed scheme is able to execute a given task with exponentially convergent position errors. Moreover, an explicit bound relationship between the control input noise and the end-effector position error is analytically derived. Furthermore, numerical comparisons substantiate the superiority, effectiveness, and accuracy of the proposed distributed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Redundancy resolution is of great importance in the control of manipulators. Among the existing results for handling this issue, the quadratic program approaches, which are capable of optimizing performance indices subject to physical constraints, are widely used. However, the existing quadratic program approaches require exactly knowing all the physical parameters of manipulators, the condition of which may not hold in some practical applications. This fact motivates us to consider the application of adaptive control techniques for simultaneous parameter identification and neural control. However, the inherent nonlinearity and nonsmoothness of the neural model prohibits direct applications of adaptive control to this model and there has been no existing result on adaptive control of robotic arms using projection neural network (PNN) approaches with parameter convergence. Different from conventional treatments in joint angle space, we investigate the problem from the joint speed space and decouple the nonlinear part of the Jacobian matrix from the structural parameters that need to be learnt. Based on the new representation, we establish the first adaptive PNN with online learning for the redundancy resolution of manipulators with unknown physical parameters, which tackles the dilemmas in existing methods. The proposed method is capable of simultaneously optimizing performance indices subject to physical constraints and handling parameter uncertainty. Theoretical results are presented to guarantee the performance of the proposed neural network. Besides, simulations based on a PUMA 560 manipulator with unknown physical parameters together with the comparison with an existing PNN substantiate the efficacy and superiority of the proposed neural network, and verify the theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We analyze the behavior of redundant robots when the joint motion is generated by inverting task velocity commands through a kinematic control scheme. Depending on the chosen inversion scheme, the robot motion is subject to differential constraints that may or may not be integrable. Accordingly, we give a classification in terms of holonomic, partially nonholonomic, and completely nonholonomic behavior, pointing out also the relationship with the so-called cyclicity property. This general classification is illustrated by means of several examples. When the kinematic control scheme is nonholonomic, the whole configuration space of the robot is accessible by a proper choice of the task input commands. Under this assumption, we address the joint reconfiguration problem, namely the design of end-effector velocity commands that drive the robot to a desired joint configuration. To solve this problem, it is possible to borrow existing methods for motion planning of nonholonomic mechanical systems, such as the sinusoidal steering technique for chained-form systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]