Obstacle avoidance of manipulators with rate constraints

The paper presents a new control method which achieves autonomous obstacle avoidance for manipulators with rate constraints. More precisely, in order to achieve the autonomous obstacle avoidance, we exploit the freedom of the coordinate transformation for feedback linearization of nonlinear control systems. At the same time, we cope with the rate constraints by adopting the state-dependent time scale transformation. Furthermore, we apply this method to an actual two-link robot manipulator, and evaluate its effectiveness by experiment, which is the most important part of the paper. Index Terms--Feedback linearization, master-slave control, obstacle avoidance, robot manipulators, time scaling.