Coordinated Motion Control of Robot Arm Based on Virtual Internal Model

Abstract

This paper proposes an alternative coordinated motion control architecture of robot arms manipulating an object. The motion and the internal force of the object are resolved into the motion of each arm. And each arm is controlled based on the virtual internal model so as to operate in coordination even if geometric errors exist in the robot arms and the object. The virtual internal model is a reference model driven by sensory information implemented in the controller. The proposed architecture will keep the stability of the system even if the breakage of the manipulated object occurs. The control algorithm is experimentally applied to the coordinated motion control of two planar robot arms, each of which has three degress of freedom. The results illustrate the validity of the proposed control architecture.