Collision Reaction Through Internal Stress Loading in Cooperative Manipulation

Abstract

Cooperative manipulation offers many advantages over single-arm manipulation. However, this comes at a cost of added complexity, both in modeling and control of multi-arm systems. Much research has been focused on determining optimal load distribution strategies based on several objective functions, some of which include manipulability, energy consumption and joint torque minimization. This paper presents an internal loading strategy that is subject to the estimate of the external disturbances along the body of one or more of the arms involved in the manipulation process. The authors of this paper propose a reaction strategy to external disturbances by transforming the disturbance forces into internal forces on the object through appropriate load distribution on the cooperative arms. The goal is to have a set-point on the object, track a given trajectory while compensating for external disturbances along the links of some of the robot arms involved in the cooperative manipulation.