Passive velocity field control approach to robot contour following

Abstract

In many applications, a robot is required to follow a contour. This requires the various degrees of freedom of the robot to be well coordinated so that the position of the robot does not fall outside the specified contour. However, the speed at which the contour is followed is very often not very critical. In this paper, we propose a control methodology in which the coordination aspect is made explicit by specifying the task using a velocity field on the manifold related to configuration space of the robot. The passive control law proposed in [5, 6] is used so that the defined velocity field is tracked and the robot traces out the desired contour. Using this control scheme, timing along the contour can be naturally varied online by a self pacing scheme so that the tracking performance can be improved. The experimental results of the proposed scheme applied to a robot following a Lissajous contour are presented. 1. Introduction Traditionally, a robot manipulation task is specified by m...