Motion Control Strategy for Robot Manipulators in the Neighbourhood of Singularities

This work presents a control strategy applied to robot manipulators operating close to kinematic singularities. Considering the robot to be in contact with the environment, a PD controller is iInplelnented with inverse dynamics compensation to control the robot manipulator. In order to accomlTIodate the forces originated froln the interaction with the environment, the control systelTI includes an impedance loop that modifies the robot's references accordingly. In the vicinity of a singularity, the algorithm generates a fictitious force to which a second impedance function is applied. This causes a small deviation to the original robot trajectory to avoid the singularity region. The algoritlun is based on the minimwn singular value of the Jacobian matrix in order to generate the module and direction of the fictitious force. This strategy is applied to a teleoperation system without time delay